Understanding Transaction Types

Every row in your Transaction List carries a small colored label — its kind. The kind tells you, at a glance, what really happened: did money actually move at the bank, or did the system just shift numbers between fund buckets? This page explains the kind labels and the Money Trail panel, a plain-language timeline on each transaction's detail page that shows the related entries around it.

Not every transaction is the same. A donor's $250 PayPal gift is real cash arriving. Sweeping that PayPal balance into your Mercury checking account is real cash moving between your own accounts. Releasing a donor restriction so a grant can be spent moves no cash at all — it's a bookkeeping entry that recharacterizes money you already hold.

For a board member, executive director, or staff member who isn't a trained accountant, telling these apart used to be impossible: everything that wasn't a plain Receipt or Payment showed the same generic "Journal Entry" label. The kind labels fix that, and the Money Trail panel turns a single transaction into a readable story of where the money came from and where it went.

NP Ledger shows a kind label on each transaction, color-coded so you can learn one simple rule:

Bright color = real money. Amber = accounting-only. Gray = clerical.

Kinds vs. the underlying transaction type

Under the hood, NP Ledger still records four transaction types — Receipt, Payment, Journal Entry, and Payroll Entry (see the Transaction List guide). The kind labels are a friendlier reading on top of that: a Journal Entry is broken out into Transfer, Fund Reclass, Correction, or Opening Balance based on which accounts it touches, so you never see a bare "Journal Entry" that hides what actually happened.

Entries that show more than one label

Some journal entries legitimately do two things at once. An entry that moves cash between accounts and releases a restriction touches both bank accounts and fund balances, so it shows both a Transfer and a Fund Reclass label, side by side. That's not an error — the labels are telling you the whole truth about a single entry.

Labels don't filter — the Filters panel does

The kind labels are informational only; clicking one does nothing. To narrow the list to a single kind, open the Filters panel on the Transaction List and choose from the Type dropdown, which now understands Transfer, Fund Reclass, Correction, and Opening Balance alongside Receipt, Payment, and Payroll.

The Type filter is additive, which keeps it honest: filter by "Transfer" and an entry that is both a Transfer and a Fund Reclass still appears — and still shows both of its labels. The filter chooses which rows you see; the labels always show every kind a row belongs to.

Open any transaction that touched a real bank or payment account and you'll find a Money Trail panel below its line items. It answers the question a board member actually asks: where did this money come from, and where did it go?

The panel leads with a one-sentence, plain-language summary — for example, "This $250 donation went into PayPal (Project Tortuga), which was swept to Mercury Checking on Jun 5." Below the summary is a vertical timeline of the entries on this transaction's money path, each labeled with a plain-language role:

• ● This transaction — the entry you're looking at, highlighted with a solid pill so it's unmistakable in the timeline.
• Funds received — the donations or other receipts that fed this money path.
• Moved between accounts — a transfer that swept the cash from one of your accounts to another.

Every entry in the timeline links to its own detail page, which has its own Money Trail panel centered on that event — so you can walk a donation's whole lifecycle one click at a time.

The trail follows this transaction's path

The Money Trail is directional: it shows the path of the transaction you clicked, not every transaction that happens to share its account. What you see depends on what you opened:

• Open a donation (Receipt) and the trail is a short, forward thread: this gift and the single sweep that carried it onward into your operating account. The dozens of other donations that landed in the same PayPal or Stripe account aren't on this dollar's path, so they're kept out of the thread — summarized instead as a one-line footnote ("12 other donations into this account in the same period →") that opens the Transaction List of receipts so you can find them.
• Open a Transfer (a sweep between your own accounts) and the trail shows the transfer's components — the individual donations that made up that lump sum — plus the onward hop to wherever the money went next. Here the donations genuinely are the parts of what you clicked, so showing them is the point.
• Open a Payment, Payroll, or other entry and the trail shows the nearest funding that came in and the nearest sweep that went out, giving just enough context without the noise.

Account blocks and collapsing big groups

The timeline is grouped into per-account blocks — a bordered box per bank or payment account — so you can read the money as it moves between accounts. A transfer is drawn as the bridge between two blocks, and each account further down the chain is indented one step, so a donation → PayPal → checking journey reads as a staircase rather than a flat list.

When a block holds a large group of donations, it collapses by default to a single summary line — "14 donations totaling $720.18 — show all" — that you expand with a click (and collapse again with "— hide"). Nothing is hidden permanently; the count and total are always visible, and the full detail is one click away. The clicked transaction's own block is never collapsed.

If a single transfer swept more than about two dozen donations, the panel lists the first batch and shows the rest as a "+ N more donations in this transfer →" footnote that links out to the Transaction List, so very large sweeps stay fast to load.

How related transactions are chosen

The Money Trail is a heuristic, not a hard-wired link. NP Ledger doesn't store explicit connections between related lifecycle transactions, so the panel starts from entries that share the same fund and the same bank/payment account as the transaction you're viewing, within a ±90-day window. It then keeps only the ones that are directionally on this transaction's path, following the per-type rules described above (The trail follows this transaction's path). That directional filter is what keeps a busy operating account from dragging every unrelated sweep and sibling donation into the trail.

When the panel doesn't appear

The Money Trail only shows for transactions that touched a real bank or payment account. A pure Correction or pure Fund Reclass moves no cash, so there's no trail to draw — the panel simply doesn't render, rather than showing an empty box. The trail also leaves out draft and voided transactions, so it reflects only real, posted activity.

• A "Transfer" you expected to be a "Payment." If a bank or processor fee shows as a Transfer, it's because the entry only touched asset accounts. Recording fees as Payments keeps them labeled correctly.
• A donation's full story. Open a receipt and read its Money Trail to confirm the gift was swept to your operating account and any restriction was released as expected.

• Reading the kind label as a filter. Clicking a label does nothing — use the Filters panel's Type dropdown to narrow the list.
• Expecting a Money Trail on a fund reclass. Pure Fund Reclasses and Corrections move no cash, so they have no Money Trail panel by design.
• Treating the Money Trail as a formal audit trail. It's a directional, ±90-day, same-fund-and-account heuristic meant for quick understanding. The General Ledger and Fund Transactions reports are the authoritative record.
• Expecting every sibling donation in a receipt's trail. A donation's trail is deliberately thin — just that gift and the sweep that carried it onward. The other donations into the same account are summarized as a footnote link, not threaded into the path.