Merchants & Rules

Merchants Overview

The Merchant Directory is your master index of all distinct business entities where you have transacted.

Use this directory to:

• Audit your spending presence across different business brands.
• Identify new, recurring, growing, or dormant merchants.
• Search spelling variations and clean up merchant naming clutter.

Filtering and Badges

The directory categorizes your business footprint dynamically:

• All: Displays your complete business transaction list, ordered by monthly spending.
• Active This Month: Businesses transacted in the current calendar month.
• High Spend: Merchants that fall into your top quartile (25%) of spending for the month.
• Growing: Merchants where spending has significantly increased compared to the previous month.
• Dormant: Businesses where you haven’t spent any funds in a long time (default cutoff is between 30 to 90 days, calculated from historical baseline).
• Badges:
  • Spike: Indicates a sudden, major spike in spending volume/count compared to last month.
  • New: First-ever recorded transaction with this business.
  • Recurring: Standard recurring spend pattern present across successive months.

Administrative Actions

Tap the options menu at the top-right to trigger:

• Resync Rules: Re-runs background intelligence queries to rebuild automated category mappings based on transaction history. (Custom user-defined rules are never overridden).
• Cleanup Rules: Automatically audits database mappings to delete obsolete, orphaned, or duplicate mappings.

Merchant Details

Select any merchant from the directory to inspect its profile and transaction history.

Key details displayed:

• Spend Snapshot: Displays total spending, lifetime transaction count, average transaction size, and the first/last transaction dates.
• Alternate Naming (Aliases): View the spelling variations captured from raw bank files or SMS messages that are currently grouped under this canonical merchant profile.
• Detected Categories: Shows the default categories mapped for spending (expenses) and income transactions.
• Visual Analytics:
  • Spend by Category: A progress list breaking down your spending across different parent categories.
  • Spend by Account: A progress list showing which bank accounts or credit cards were used to pay this merchant.
  • 6-Month Trend: A bar chart displaying monthly spending totals over the last half-year.
• Recent Transactions: Scrollable transaction history. Tap any transaction row to open its details view.

Alternate Names & Rules

Bank files, card slips, and SMS text notifications often format merchant names differently (e.g., Zomato*Rest, Zomato-Food, ZOMATO). You can combine these and set default categories.

Combine Similar Names (Aliases)

To prevent duplicates and merge alternate spellings:

1. Under the merchant details screen, tap Manage in the Alternate Naming section.
2. Under Suggested Names, select the checkbox of spelling variations identified by the app’s scanner.
3. Tap Link Selected to merge them.
4. Any future scans containing those variations will automatically be clean-mapped to the main canonical merchant profile.
5. If you need to separate them, tap Unlink next to any active name.

Category Mapping Rules

Define default category mappings to save manual categorization effort on future entries:

1. Tap Edit next to For spending or For income in the Detected Categories section.
2. Select the default category and subcategory.
3. Toggle Update Past Transactions if you want to apply this category change retrospectively to all matching transactions in your ledger.
4. Tap Save to apply.