Changing the sign of a transaction as it is automatically imported

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1

I tried to search but only got a lot of answers regarding credit cards and checkbook balancing, which is not my issue. Maybe I’m not searching the correct terms.

When my pre-tax (401k) contributions are drawn, they go directly into a Schwab account and directly purchase Vanguard 2050. This purchase is imported as a negative number. For instance, let’s say I contribute 2000, it shows up as -2000 on my Transactions sheet under my Schwab account.

There is NO other Transaction documented. This money does not appear in any other account first. It is not “transferred” over to Schwab before the purchase transaction. There is exactly one transaction, a Buy transaction that is -2000.

The issue is that this is INCOME. And it’s POSITIVE INCOME.

I first tried to just mark this as income, but then on my Spending Trends it shows up under the Income section as negative, decreasing my Income and generally messing everything up. Then I tried to mark it as an expense, hoping that the two negatives would cancel out but alas, now it shows up under Expense but is still contributing -2000 to my cashflow rather than +2000.

Relatedly, management fees on this account are pulled as positive numbers whereas expenses in other accounts are pulled as a negative numbers but this is a relatively minor issue in comparison.

What I’d love to be able to do is to reverse the sign of ALL transactions from this one account during the “Fill” step so that the purchase of Vanguard 2050 is +2000 income (which it is) and that Fees would be negative (like the expenses they are).

Failing that, I’m open to suggestions on how to make these pre-tax income and management fees at least display correctly on the Spending Trends and other related sheets.

2

I struggle with that as well. I use Paycheck Deduction Transaction Generator to break out all my deductions, which include a 403b contribution.

The proper way to track this would be to show the transfer out of the paycheck and transfer into the Schwab account. Then for each investment (eg. Vanguard 2050) show the transfer out of the Schwab account and the transfer into that particular investment. Then each investment would have a monthly transaction showing the “interest” which would amount to the change in the balance of the investment.

I don’t get all those transactions for my 403b, and I haven’t gotten into the weeds on manually adding all that info, so I treat my 403b deduction as an expense, and then I just let the 403b balance, which usually increases by at least that much, be reflected in my Net Worth. Would love to hear how others are handling this!

3

Poking around more it seems that AutoCat is very close to doing what I’d like it to do, since it can apply rules to any cell in new transactions (originally I thought it only worked on the Category column). However, the Column Override appears to not take formulas, which is sad since I really only need to multiply the cell by -1.

4

You are becoming an advanced user, @Estaria, now that you’ve learned to do more than categorize with AutoCat. :raised_hands:

Unfortunately, at this time, the tool is not built to modify values (like the Amount). Further, you can use formulas in the rule cells, but they are rendered to values then sent to Autocat whenever the tool is run, so Autocat will just see the value, not the formula.