Set up a credit card the right way.

Add the card — linked or by hand

On the Accounts tab, tap Add. If you link the card's bank through Connect Bank Account, the card comes in with it — name, type and balance all filled in by the sync, so skip straight to step three. For a card you'd rather keep unlinked, choose Add Manual Account and tap the Credit Card tile. Name it the way it's printed on the plastic — in Classic Mode you'll see that name again on a budget row.

New to manual accounts in general? The manual-account guide walks the whole form in two minutes.

Enter what you owe, as a positive number

Under Current Balance, type what you owe today — from the card app or your latest statement. Positive, no minus sign: the helper text under the field says “Enter your current balance owed (positive number)”, and it means it. Then tap Add Account.

From here the direction is automatic. A purchase you log against the card raises the balance (more debt); a payment into it lowers it (less debt). You never flip a sign by hand.

Know where the starting balance went

What happens to the balance you walked in with depends on your budget mode — this is the one step where the two modes differ.

Classic Mode: Spense creates a Credit Card Payments category on your Budget tab with a row named after the card, and records a Starting Balance transaction on the card for the amount you owe. This month's row starts with that debt already counted, so the old balance can't sneak into a spending category as if you'd bought it today. The row belongs to the system — you can't delete it by hand, and it goes away on its own if you ever delete the card. The row is made at the moment you add the card, so it exists for cards added while you're in Classic Mode; a card added under Spense Magic doesn't grow one later if you switch.

Spense Magic: nothing extra appears. The balance shows on the Accounts tab with your other debts, and the budget is left alone.

Categorize purchases on the card like any other spending

A $60 grocery run on the card is a grocery run. Give it the same category you'd give it on debit — Groceries, not “credit card” — whether it syncs in or you log it by hand on the Spending tab against the card account. The spending is counted once, when you buy. That's the whole trick: by the time the bill comes, the money was already spent and already in a category.

In Classic Mode, Spense also adds each purchase on the card to the card row's Charged total, so the row keeps a running tally of what the bill will need to cover. A category that guesses wrong is a two-tap fix — here's how.

Record payments as transfers, not spending

Paying the card is not a new expense — it's money moving between two of your own accounts. Count it as spending and the month counts your groceries twice. How you record it depends on whether the accounts are linked:

• Both linked: let the sync bring the payment in — don't also log it by hand, or it lands twice. Spense looks for card payments as they sync and treats them as transfers, so they stay out of your spending totals. In Classic Mode the payment waits in Review with a note — “This is a credit card payment. Assign it to your CC Payment category to track payments.” — with the card's row pre-selected when Spense can match it. Approve it.
• Either account manual: on the Spending tab, tap Add, switch on Transfer between accounts, choose checking as the From Account and the card as the To Account, enter the amount, and tap Transfer. The category picker disappears on purpose: transfers don't touch your spending categories.