Usually transfer between a system and its surroundings applies to transfer of a state variable, and obeys a balance law, that the amount lost by the donor system is equal to the amount gained by the receptor system. Heat is not a state variable. For his 1947 definition of "heat transfer" for discrete open systems, the author Prigogine carefully explains at some length that his definition of it does not obey a balance law. He describes this as paradoxical.