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 moved money in or out of an account that holds value — a bank, card, or payment account, and also something like Pledges Receivable — 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?

Some of what it shows is a recorded link — the books know that this payment settled that bill. The rest is a best guess from nearby activity. The panel is explicit about which one you're looking at, and that distinction is the most useful thing on it (see How related transactions are chosen, below).

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.

Where the trail is built from a recorded link (see below), each role names the entry's relationship to the thing they're all linked to instead — "Bill recorded," "Earlier payment on this bill," "Original transaction," "Superseded entry." You don't have to work out why an entry is on the panel; the label says so.

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 an entry with a recorded link — a bill payment, a refund, the reversing entry a void creates, a corrected re-import — and the trail is that link's story, and nothing else. A recorded link always wins. A refund is a good example: it looks like a donation, and it would otherwise get the donation treatment below, but because the books know which gift it reversed, you get that instead.
• Open a donation (Receipt) with no such link 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 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. For this purpose a transfer means money that left one place you hold money and landed in another: both sides have to be a bank, card, or payment account you've set up in NP Ledger. An entry labeled Transfer that doesn't move cash that way — an interfund transfer, or a pledge payment clearing a receivable — is not traced as one, because there's no account-to-account path to draw.
• Open anything else 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 is always visible, the full detail is one click away, and the total shows whenever the entries in the group genuinely add up to something (see Counts without totals, below). 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 — and how to tell which kind you're reading

There are two kinds of Money Trail, and the panel header tells you which one you've got. Read that line first; it's the difference between something your books can prove and something the app worked out.

Some entries have a recorded link. When you pay a bill, NP Ledger writes down which bill you paid. When you refund a gift or void an entry, it writes down which entry was undone. When a corrected import replaces an earlier one, it writes down which entry it replaced. On those panels the trail follows the link — every entry shown is there because the books say it belongs, not because it happened to be nearby. The header drops the "best guess" wording and names the connection it's using instead:

Every entry here is recorded against the same bill.

Other entries have no such link. Nothing writes down that a particular donation is the one that got swept into your checking account three days later — the money just moved. For those, the panel starts from entries that share the same fund and the same bank or payment account as the transaction you're viewing, within a ±90-day window, then keeps only the ones directionally on this transaction's path. That's a good guess, and it's usually right, and the header says exactly what it is:

Matched by account and date within 90 days — a best guess from nearby activity, not a recorded link.

No panel mixes the two. A trail is either all recorded links or all nearby activity, so you never have to work out which rows you can lean on.

When there's nothing to trace, the panel says so

Some entries are genuinely the whole story. Guessing at whatever else happened in the account that week would be worse than useless — it would look like an answer. So instead of an empty box or an unrelated entry, you get one plain sentence explaining why there's nothing further:

• "Paid directly — no bill was recorded, so there's no earlier entry to trace." You paid the expense in one step rather than recording a bill first and paying it later. Both halves are in the entry you're looking at. Nothing is wrong; there's just no earlier entry, because you never made one.
• "This pay run is the whole record. Pay runs aren't linked to the tax payments that follow, so there's nothing further to trace." NP Ledger doesn't connect a pay run to the tax remittance you send afterward, so it won't pretend to.
• "The books begin here. This is the opening balance brought in at setup, so there's nothing earlier to trace." This is the starting-balance entry from when you onboarded. By definition nothing comes before it.
• "This moved money between funds, not between accounts. The cash itself didn't go anywhere, so there's no bank activity to trace." An interfund transfer re-labels which fund the money belongs to. Your bank balance is identical before and after, so there's no account-to-account movement to follow.

In all four cases the panel is still there and still answering you. That's a different thing from the panel not showing up at all, which is covered next.

When the panel doesn't appear

The Money Trail only shows for transactions that touched an account holding value. A pure Correction or pure Fund Reclass shifts numbers between funds or categories without touching one, so there's no trail to draw — the panel simply doesn't render, rather than showing an empty box.

On a best-guess panel, draft and voided transactions are left out, so what you see is real, posted activity only. On a link-following panel a voided entry can still appear, and that's deliberate: if you voided a bill, the void is part of that bill's story, and hiding it would leave the panel quietly empty on exactly the entry you opened it to understand.

Counts without totals

When a group of entries collapses into a summary line, you'll usually see a count and a total — "14 donations totaling $720.18." On some link-following panels you'll see the count alone. That's on purpose. A refund panel holds the original gift and the money handed back; a corrected re-import holds an entry that was unwound and the entry standing in its place. Adding those together produces a number that doesn't describe anything real, so the panel gives you the count it can stand behind and leaves out the total it can't. Each entry's own amount is still shown beside it.

• 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 a best-guess trail as a formal audit trail. When the header says "a best guess from nearby activity," that's a directional, ±90-day, same-fund-and-account match meant for quick understanding. The General Ledger and Fund Transactions reports are the authoritative record.
• Reading past the panel header. It's one small line, and it's the line that tells you whether the entries below are recorded links or a best guess. Worth a glance before you rely on what's underneath.
• 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.
• Reading "there's nothing further to trace" as a problem. On a direct payment, a pay run, an opening balance, or an interfund transfer, that sentence is the correct and complete answer — not a sign that something failed to record.