Reimbursements & Refunds

Money coming back belongs against the purchase it came from, not in your income.

Updated August 21, 2026

When to Link Something

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.

Linking a Refund to Its Expense

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

Refund and Reimbursement keep their Budget field

Every other income category loses it, because income has no budget to spend against. These two keep it precisely because money coming back has to be able to reduce what a budget already spent.

Reading the Net Cost

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.

Unlinking

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.

Good to Know

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 nets it against the original month.
Cadence can spot an obvious match and offer it to you rather than waiting to be asked. The suggestion appears on the transaction and in the Needs Review widget on your dashboard.
A refund left unlinked sits in Needs Review rather than disappearing quietly, so an unfinished one is easy to find later.