You spend £80 at a supermarket on your credit card, then pay £80 from your current account to the card. Your household bought £80 of groceries—not £160. The purchase is spending; the repayment moves money between two parts of your finances.
A bank-fed Excel budget needs both records for account checks, but only the purchase belongs in the grocery total. This guide sets up that distinction and shows where BankSync's Transfer Matcher can help.
One purchase, three bank records
| Record | Movement | Spending view |
|---|---|---|
| Card: supermarket purchase | £80 charged | £80 groceries |
| Current account: card repayment | £80 leaves | Transfer, not another grocery expense |
| Card: repayment received | £80 credited | Settlement, not household income |
Decide which report you are building
A spending report measures purchases by category. A current-account cash report measures money entering and leaving that specific account. A consolidated cash view combines a defined set of accounts and excludes movements within that set.
Those reports can legitimately show different totals. The £80 card repayment is a real outflow from the current account, even though it adds no new grocery spending. Keep report names and filters explicit instead of deleting the payment to make every chart agree.
Connect the current account and card where both are supported, then retain account, currency, date, amount, description and Type in Excel. Inspect the source sign convention for each account before creating calculations. Card liabilities can be presented differently from deposit-account balances.
Use BankSync’s Transfer Matcher
Create or open the matcher
In Enrichments, choose Transfer Matcher under Guard data. There is one matcher per workspace.
Keep tagging initially
Choose Tag so source records remain in the destination. Suppression deliberately removes matched records and is harder to audit.
Attach relevant feeds
In Dependencies, include the transaction feeds for the accounts you move money between, then enable the enrichment.
Map the evidence
Map Type and Transfer Pair into Excel. Matched legs receive a shared pair identifier.
Review sample pairs
Check both account identities, amount, currency, dates and descriptions before excluding tagged pairs from the spending report.
Understand what a match means
The documented matching rules look for opposite signs, equal amounts, different accounts and dates within a configured window. The default date window is four days, with a configurable maximum of fourteen. The matcher can consider candidates from different attached feeds and sync runs.
A match is a useful classification signal, not proof of intent. Two unrelated records can have the same amount. Keep the pair identifier visible and review ambiguous cases. The Transfer Matcher documentation describes the matching and suppression behaviour.
Three reports, three treatments
| Report | Purchase | Repayment |
|---|---|---|
| Household spending by category | Include grocery purchase | Exclude reviewed transfer |
| Current-account cash movements | Absent if purchase occurred on card | Include outgoing payment |
| Card account reconciliation | Include card charge | Include incoming settlement |
Handle refunds, fees and part-payments separately
A refund reduces the relevant purchase cost; it is not the same as a transfer to another account. BankSync can label eligible same-account reversals differently from transfers, so do not filter both types out indiscriminately. Keep the original purchase and refund traceable.
Card interest and fees are additional costs. A £500 card payment may settle several purchases and fees from an earlier period; do not allocate the entire repayment to this month's shopping. If you need a purchase breakdown, use the card transactions rather than the current-account payment description.
For part-payments or complex settlements, inspect the actual incoming and outgoing bank records. The matcher requires equal observed amounts and sufficient source data; do not assume every repayment will pair automatically. Currency conversion and fees can also prevent a simple equal-amount match.
Build an exclusion that you can explain
Create a reviewed reporting classification separate from the original description. Your spending view can include merchant purchases and fees, net appropriate refunds, and exclude confirmed internal transfers. Keep an Unreviewed bucket rather than silently dropping ambiguous rows.
Test with the £80 example. Grocery spending should be £80, the current account should show an £80 outflow, and the card register should show the purchase and settlement. Then reconcile each account against its own statement.
Do not add a second feed with overlapping accounts into the same worksheet as a shortcut. BankSync's normal incremental deduplication does not make independently overlapping import routes interchangeable.
Reviewed: 1 November 2026. References: Transfer Matcher, transaction handling, and Excel integration.