Money moving is not money spent

A transfer between your own accounts is not an expense. Obvious stated plainly, and yet most financial software books it as one.

The reason is a category error, in both senses. A category tells you what a transaction was for — dining, rent, transport. People then ask that same field to tell them what the transaction did to their net worth. It cannot do both.

Two dimensions, not one

Once you separate them, the awkward cases resolve themselves:

Transaction	Category	What it did
Card settlement	Credit card	Paid off purchases already counted
Loan installment	Debt	Reduced principal
Buying an ETF	Investments	Converted cash to an asset
Lunch	Dining	Consumption

Only the last row is spending. The other three move money without consuming it, and counting them inflates the total by whatever they happen to sum to.

In one real month that error was worth a factor of 2.4 — a reported figure of 74,000 against actual consumption near 31,000. The dashboard was not lying, exactly. It was answering a different question from the one being asked of it.