Bulk Editing

It is for the moments when one-at-a-time edits would take ages and the change is essentially the same each time:

• Cleaning up after a CSV import that landed uncategorised.
• Recategorising months of transactions from a single merchant.
• Deleting duplicates after re-linking an account.
• Moving a batch of transactions onto a different budget.

You can start from any transaction list: the full transactions screen, a filtered search result, or the activity inside a budget or account.

The way in is the round icon at the left of a transaction row - the merchant logo - rather than the row itself.

1. On mobile, tap the icon. Nothing is drawn there at rest, but the icon is the target, and tapping it starts selection mode with that transaction already selected.
2. On desktop, hover the icon and a checkbox appears over the logo. Click it.
3. A multi-select toolbar appears at the top or bottom of the screen.
4. Tap further transactions to add them to the selection.

Long-pressing the row still works on mobile if that is the habit you have. Leave selection mode at any time by deselecting everything or tapping the cancel control.

Tapping every transaction is fine for ten and painful for three hundred. Select All grabs everything currently in the list.

The important detail is that Select All acts on the filtered, visible set. So the pattern that makes bulk editing safe is: scope the list first with search and filters, check the list looks right, then select all. See Searching & Filtering.

• Category - reassign every selected transaction to a new category.
• Budget - move them onto a different budget.
• Account - assign them to one of your manual accounts, or to No account. Transactions you added yourself and imported ones both take it; synced ones do not.
• Delete - remove them.

All four are available wherever you enter selection mode; only the category, budget and account options offered change with context.

Account is written to transactions you typed in and to ones that came from a CSV import. A synced transaction belongs to the bank account it came from, so it is left as it is. In a household, an account kept private to one person only takes that person’s private transactions. So a mixed selection can be partly updated, and Cadence Money says so rather than pretending otherwise: the message afterwards names how many it changed and how many it skipped. If nothing in the selection could take the account, it tells you that instead.

A bulk account change never touches the account’s balance. If the balance should move, adjust it on the account itself, or change the transactions one at a time, where Cadence Money offers to update it.

Two of the actions quietly change more than the field you picked:

• Moving transactions to a category that is not budgetable - Transfer, Investments, an income category or Uncategorized - clears their budget, because those do not count as spending. Moving between ordinary spending categories leaves the budget alone.
• A bulk budget change removes any Timed Budget Redirect on those transactions, so they stop following the redirect period and stay on the budget you just picked.

A bulk category change also pins that categorisation, so Cadence Money will not recategorise those transactions automatically later. It counts as you overriding the answer, so if a Transaction Rule had decided the category, the rule stops being named on those rows.

What you can undo depends on the action:

• Category and budget changes can be reverted by repeating the bulk action with the original value, often using the same filter you used the first time.
• Delete depends on where the transaction came from.

When some of the selected transactions are tied to manual accounts, the delete confirmation lists each account’s balance before and after, with an unticked box to update them too. Leave it unticked and only the transactions go.