Reimbursements & Refunds

Link it whenever money comes back because of a specific purchase:

• A store refund for something you returned.
• An expense claim your employer paid back.
• An insurance claim against a repair you paid for.
• A friend paying you their share of a bill you covered.

If money arrived for no particular purchase - a bonus, interest, a tax refund - it is income, not a reimbursement. Give it an income category and let Additional Income collect it instead.

If you are constantly fronting money and claiming it back - work travel, business expenses - an Out of Pocket budget collects the whole cycle in one place and keeps it out of your own spending. Linking works exactly the same inside one, and it also accepts a single lump-sum payout covering many purchases, which has no one expense to link to.

1. Open the incoming transaction - the refund or reimbursement itself.
2. Give it the Refund or Reimbursement category if it does not have one already. The link button only appears on those two.
3. Tap Link to Expense.
4. Search for the original purchase and select it.
5. Tap Link Expense to confirm.

If the button reads Already linked to {budget} instead, that transaction is already assigned somewhere and there is nothing to link.

Once linked, the original expense shows both figures: what you paid and what it came to after the money came back. Spend $100, get $80 back, and the expense reads a net cost of $20.

Your budget counts the net figure, not the gross, so a fully refunded purchase stops consuming budget altogether. The refund does not appear as income anywhere, which is the whole point - counting it twice would overstate both what you earned and what you spent.

A partial refund works the same way: the expense simply nets down by whatever came back. You can link more than one refund to the same purchase when it was refunded in instalments.

Open either transaction and remove the link - the linked row on each one carries the control. Both go back to standing on their own, the expense returns to its full amount, and neither transaction is deleted.

Do this when a refund was matched to the wrong purchase. Relinking it to the right one is a separate step afterwards.

If Cadence Money had made the link itself, unlinking is also how you tell it not to. It will not re-link that refund on a later sync.

• Linking works across sources. A synced refund can be linked to a manual expense, and the other way round.
• The refund does not have to be in the same month as the purchase. Cadence Money nets it against the original month.
• A refund left unlinked sits in the Needs Review widget on your dashboard rather than disappearing quietly, so an unfinished one is easy to find later.

On a synced refund, Cadence Money sometimes does this step itself. During a bank sync it looks for an expense that matches the refund exactly on all three of:

• the same amount, to the cent;
• the same account;
• within 14 days of each other.

If exactly one expense fits, and that expense has exactly one refund claiming it, the link is written. Anything less certain is left alone: two candidate expenses, two refunds competing for the same purchase, or a pending transaction on either side all mean Cadence Money does nothing and leaves it for you.

It is not a suggestion sitting on the transaction waiting to be accepted - there is no such prompt. Either the link is there, or you make it yourself. Only inside the Link to Expense picker does Cadence Money lean on the same reasoning without committing: it sorts the likeliest purchase to the top and pre-selects it when one is an obvious fit, which you still confirm with Link Expense.

Unlinking is remembered. When you break a link that Cadence Money made, it will never re-link that refund automatically, so a later sync cannot quietly undo your correction. You can always link it to the right expense by hand afterwards.