Transactions Imported with the Wrong Sign or Direction

Statements are read automatically; you never set the sign of an individual transaction yourself. Direction comes from one of two sources, depending on the statement:

• If the specific bank or brokerage layout matched to your statement has a trailing negative indicator built into its template (an amount written like "500.00 (-)" is recognized as negative even though the minus sign trails the number), that declared pattern is used.
• If the matched layout has no such pattern declared, direction falls back entirely to the classification made during extraction — essentially, a judgment call on whether each line is a credit or a debit.

That second path has a real limitation: nothing checks the result afterward. There is no automatic detection that catches a statement where the classification went wrong across the board. If extraction misreads or misclassifies a layout with trailing negatives, every transaction on that statement can come through as an inflow, and the platform has no built-in signal that anything is off — you'll only see it as a reconciliation failure.

If you're seeing exactly this — a statement where the negative sign trails the amount and everything reads as money coming in — that's this failure mode. It isn't something you can fix by re-checking your own entry, because you never typed the amounts in the first place.

Invert Signs is the remedy for a statement that came through with its direction wrong across the board. Before using it, know exactly what it does:

• It flips the sign of every transaction in the period, plus both the starting and ending balances. There is no way to apply it to a selection of transactions.
• It is only available while the statement is unreconciled. If the statement has already reconciled, unreconcile it first.
• It clears existing matches on the affected transactions. If you've already matched some of these transactions to other records, inverting the statement will undo those matches.

When it works, you'll see: Statement and Transaction Amounts Inverted Successfully. If it fails: Error Inverting the Statement and Transaction Amounts.

Because it acts on the whole period and clears matches, use it only when the direction is wrong across the entire statement — not to fix a handful of lines.

Invert Signs cannot be scoped to a selection — it is whole-statement or nothing. If just a few transactions have the wrong direction while the rest of the statement is correct, Invert Signs is the wrong tool: using it would flip the transactions that were already right. In that case, correct the affected transactions individually instead.

You may have read that setting an account's type to Credit Card fixes sign direction. That's true on some import paths and not on others, and it's worth being precise about which:

• For CSV transaction-list imports, and for statements going through the older statement-processing path, setting the account to Credit Card does invert signs correctly.
• On the newest statement-extraction path, the account type dropdown has no effect on sign handling at all — that path detects the account type directly from the statement itself and applies its own sign convention regardless of what the account is set to in Valid8.

In other words: changing the account type to Credit Card may fix your signs, but whether it does depends on which pathway processed that particular statement — something you generally can't tell from the interface. Don't rely on it as the fix. If a statement isn't reconciling because of sign direction, Invert Signs is the reliable remedy regardless of which path processed it.