Smart Vendor Rules

Most businesses buy from the same twenty or thirty vendors, month after month. Smart Vendor Rules take that repetition off your plate: categorize a vendor once, and every future transaction from them books itself from then on.

How a rule works

A rule pairs a match pattern (text found in the bank description, like SHOPIFY) with a category (Software subscriptions, say) and optionally a cleaned-up vendor name. New transactions that match, whether they arrive by CSV import or OCR, get categorized automatically and labelled so you can see a rule did the work.

Creating rules

• From a transaction — the natural way to do it. Categorize something, and GBooks Air offers to turn it into a rule if it spots a pattern worth repeating.
• From the Rules screen — for when you already know the pattern and want to write it directly.

Writing patterns that actually match reliably

Bank descriptions are noisy: SQ *BLUE BOTTLE 0492 TORONTO ON. Match on the stable fragment, not the whole string:

Watch out for patterns that are too broad. AMZN catches every Amazon purchase, office supplies and personal alike, without distinction. For mixed-use vendors, either skip the rule and categorize by hand, or point the rule at a "review me" holding category you check weekly.

Managing your rule set

The Rules screen lists everything with its pattern and category attached — edit or delete freely, and changes only apply going forward (your already-categorized history doesn't get quietly rewritten). If two rules could plausibly match the same description, keep the patterns distinct rather than relying on which one happens to run first.