Transactions & categorization

Everything in GBooks Air flows from the transaction ledger. Reports, tax totals, audit flags — they're all just different views on the same underlying transactions. Get comfortable here and the rest of the app takes care of itself.

Three ways transactions show up

1. CSV import — does most of the heavy lifting. Bank exports come in through the Smart-Mapper, with duplicates caught along the way.
2. Receipt OCR — snap a receipt and the app drafts the transaction for you. See Receipts & OCR.
3. Manual entry — for cash purchases, adjustments, or anything without a digital paper trail. Date, description, amount, category, done.

Categorizing well

A categorized transaction quietly posts real double-entry behind it (a debit to one account, a credit to another), which is why your books always balance. A few habits that pay off over time:

• Categorize weekly, not once a year. Twenty transactions while the purchases are still fresh in memory beats a thousand of them in April.
• Let rules handle the repeats. Second time you see a vendor, turn it into a rule instead of categorizing it by hand again. Mature books mostly categorize themselves.
• When you're not sure, flag it and move on. An honest "ask my accountant" pile beats a confidently wrong category every time.

Splitting a transaction

Sometimes one payment covers several purposes — a Costco run that's half office supplies, half shop consumables. Open the transaction and choose Split, then divide it across as many categories as you need. The splits have to add up to the original total, and the app enforces that, since the bank line still has to reconcile at the end of the day.

Editing and deleting

Any transaction can be edited — date, description, amount, category, tax treatment, all of it. Two things worth knowing:

• Don't edit amounts on imported bank lines just to make a discrepancy disappear. The bank amount is the truth; fix the categorization instead, or add an adjusting entry if something's genuinely off.
• Transactions inside an archived fiscal year are locked. The year-end archive freezes closed years so a filed number can't quietly drift later.

Search and filters

The ledger filters by date range, account, vendor, amount, and free text, so "every payment to Bell over $100 last year" is a ten-second search rather than a scroll-and-squint job. Filtered views feed the exports too, so what you're looking at is exactly what lands in your report.

The 20,000-transaction capacity

GBooks Air comfortably holds 20,000 transactions, which is years of history for a typical small business. As you get close to that, the app lets you know, and the fiscal year-end archive lets you seal completed years into a downloadable archive to keep the working file fast. More on that in Storage limits.