The same shop can appear on a statement in several forms, such as “SWIGGY*ORDER”, “SWIGGY BANGALORE” and “UPI/SWIGGY/4821”. If each form is treated as a different merchant, your merchant totals and categories are split. The Merchants directory fixes that.
What the directory shows
Merchants lists every merchant in your workspace with how many transactions it has, how much you have spent there and when you last paid it. You can search by merchant name or by any alias.
Aliases: one merchant, many spellings
Open a merchant to manage its aliases. An alias is a pattern that should be recognised as that merchant. Add the spellings you see on your statements, and future imports are matched to the right merchant automatically.
Default categories
Give a merchant a default category, and new transactions from it are categorised the same way every time. The directory also shows how many merchants have a default and how many are still unmatched, which tells you where to spend your effort.
Why this pays off
- Top merchants become accurate, so you can see where money really goes.
- Fewer transactions need a manual category.
- Reports such as Top merchants by spend and Merchant visit frequency in the Report library become more meaningful.
A ten-minute clean-up
- Open Merchants and look at the unmatched ones first.
- Add aliases for the spellings you recognise.
- Set a default category for your top ten merchants.
- Open Top merchants by spend to see the effect.
Make sense of every transaction.
Search, filter, and organise your income and expenses as your financial history grows.
