Split Transactions: One Receipt, Multiple Categories

You check into a hotel for a four-night stay. Three nights are for a client meeting. The fourth night you tack on because you’ve never been to Montreal and the flights were already booked. Your credit card statement shows one charge: $800.

So which category does that $800 go in? Business travel? Personal travel? Splitting the difference in your head and hoping for the best at tax time?

This is the kind of problem that makes expense management feel harder than it should be. A single receipt, two legitimate purposes, and no clean way to record it. Until now.

Split Any Transaction in Seconds

Split Transactions let you divide any imported bank transaction into two or more child transactions, each with its own category, amount, and notes. That $800 hotel bill becomes:

• $600 → Business > Travel Lodging — “3 nights, client meetings”
• $200 → Personal > Travel — “Extra night, personal day”

Both pieces show up where they belong. The business portion appears in your business expense reports and tax calculations. The personal portion appears in your personal spending. No more mental math, no more compromise categories.

How It Works

From the Expenses page, find the transaction you want to split and click the split icon (a line branching into two) in the action row beneath it. The split modal opens, showing the original transaction details at the top and split lines below.

For each line, you choose a category and enter either a dollar amount or a percentage — the other is calculated automatically. With two lines, changing one adjusts the other to fill the remainder. Need a quick 50/50? Hit the Even Split button.

A balance indicator at the bottom turns green when your split lines add up to the original amount. Once balanced, click Split Expense and you’re done.

Beyond Business vs. Personal

The hotel example is the obvious one, but split transactions solve a whole category of accounting headaches:

Multi-department invoices. You ordered from Staples: $300 of printer paper for the office and $200 of presentation materials for a client pitch. That’s Office Expense and Cost of Goods Sold on a single receipt. Split the transaction and each amount hits the right category for accurate reporting.

Shared costs across projects. A $500 software subscription serves three different client projects. Split it 40/30/30 and allocate each piece to the right project. Your per-project cost tracking stays honest.

Mixed tax treatment. Some items on a receipt are taxable, others aren’t. Split the transaction so each child gets tax calculated based on its own category’s tax configuration. No more over- or under-reporting tax on blended purchases.

Your CSV Imports Still Work

If you’re wondering what happens when you re-import the same bank statement after splitting a transaction — nothing breaks. The original transaction stays in the database with its original hash, so duplicate detection works exactly as before. The split children have their own synthetic hashes that never collide with bank data.

This was a deliberate design choice. We didn’t want splitting a transaction to create a landmine for your next CSV import.

Edit or Undo at Any Time

Need to add a tip or update the tax on a split item? Click the dark edit icon on any child transaction to update tax, tip, and notes directly — no need to redo the entire split. Date, description, account, and amounts stay locked since they’re tied to the original transaction.

Need to change the split ratios or categories? Click Edit Split on any child transaction to reopen the modal and adjust amounts, categories, or the number of lines. The edit replaces all split lines atomically — no partial updates, no inconsistent state.

Want to undo the split entirely? Click Unsplit and the original transaction is restored to its pre-split state. All children are removed, and the parent reappears in your expense grid as if it was never split.

The only restriction: all editing is blocked while any child is on an expense report. Remove it from the report first, then make your changes. This prevents approved claims from silently losing their line items.

Works With Everything

Split children are real transactions. They work with every feature in the app:

• Tax — Each child calculates tax independently using its category’s tax rate
• Expense reports — Add business children to claims, leave personal children out
• Projects — Children inherit the parent’s project allocations automatically, and can be re-allocated independently
• Receipts — Receipt attachments are shared across all children in a split group
• Multi-currency — Foreign currency amounts are proportionally scaled to each child
• Reports — PDF and Excel reports include children in all totals and breakdowns

Available on Every Plan

Split Transactions are available on all plans, including the free trial. We consider this a core accounting feature, not a premium add-on. If you have expenses that span multiple categories, you shouldn’t have to upgrade to record them correctly.

Head to the Expenses page and look for the split icon in the action row beneath any transaction. Your mixed-purpose receipts finally have a proper home.