Your first transaction
A transaction in AI Money has five parts: amount, type (expense or income), date, category and account. Only the first three are strictly required. The rest the app can guess, and you can correct.
Recording one by hand
Open the transaction sheet, type the amount, pick expense or income, and save. That is the whole thing. Everything else has a default:
- Date defaults to today. The ledger stores the day, not the time, and inside a day the most recently added transaction shows up first.
- Category defaults to a match on what you typed. If nothing matches, it lands in Other.
- Account is optional. A transaction with no account belongs to a bucket the app calls Principal, which is real money with a real balance, just not attached to any bank you registered.
Recording one without typing
This is the part the app is built for. Six channels feed the same ledger:
| Channel | Platform | Plan |
|---|---|---|
| WhatsApp, by text, voice note or photo | Both | Free, with a daily cap |
| Bank SMS | Android | Pro |
| Payment notifications, including Google Pay | Android | Pro |
| Apple Pay, through a Shortcut | iPhone | Pro |
| Receipt photos | Both | Free, 2 per month |
| Voice notes inside the app | Both | Free, with a daily cap |
Whatever the channel, the transaction ends up in the same place, with the same fields, and it is edited the same way.
Where did it land
Every automatic capture tells you the account it went to, right in the confirmation: $25.000 COP · 🍔 Food · 🏦 Nequi.
When you see Principal in that line, it means the app could not tell which of your accounts the money came from. That is not a failure to record, the transaction is safely saved, but it is your cue to either move it or set up a routing rule so the next one lands correctly. See how accounts are chosen.
Fixing it
Edit anything by opening the transaction. If you change the category of something that was captured automatically, the app remembers the correction and applies it to future transactions with the same title. Correct "UBER TRIP" once and it stays corrected.
Delete with a long press. If the transaction is one leg of a transfer, deleting it removes both legs, because half a transfer is not a thing.
Transfers cannot be edited, only deleted and redone. Editing one leg would silently unbalance the other, and an unbalanced transfer is a wrong balance you would not notice for months.
Two entries that are not expenses
Two kinds of rows move a balance without ever counting as income or expense:
- Opening balance, created when you register an account with money already in it. It says where the account starts. It is hidden from your lists by default, and there is an Include opening balances switch in the filter sheet if you want to see it.
- Balance adjustment, created when you reconcile with your bank. If your bank says one number and the app says another because you forgot to record something, the adjustment closes the gap in one row and explains itself in your history.
Neither one inflates your monthly expenses, and neither one shows up in your category cards. If they did, one forgotten receipt would ruin a whole month of reports. The reasoning is in How balances work.