Merchant identity
The cleaned merchant string, not the raw bank descriptor. A payment reading as "RZP*ACME MEDIA PVT" resolves to Acme Media, and Acme Media has a history in your ledger.
Module 02
Transactions sorted as they settle, not at close.
Categorization is the step everything else depends on. If spend is not assigned to the right category, tracking is wrong, flags are wrong and the report is worse than no report. So this module is built to be auditable: every assignment shows what drove it, and every correction you make changes what happens next.
InputConnected accounts and cards
AssignmentOne leaf category
OverrideAlways available
What drives an assignment
Six signals, weighted, with the reasoning on record.
No single signal decides a category. The engine weighs all six and reports how confident it is, which is what lets you trust the high-confidence bulk and review the rest.
Recurrence shape
Same merchant, similar amount, regular interval. A monthly charge behaves differently from a one-off, and a software subscription behaves differently from a contractor invoice.
Account and instrument
Which card or account the spend came from. A card issued to the sales team carries different priors from the account that pays rent.
Amount shape
Order of magnitude against the category history. A 1,400 charge and a 1,40,000 charge at the same merchant are rarely the same kind of expense.
Your rules
Explicit rules you write take precedence over inference. Anything from this merchant, on this card, above this amount, goes to this category. Full stop.
Your past corrections
Every override you make becomes a signal. Correct a merchant once and the assignment holds from then on, for that merchant, on your ledger.
Accuracy, honestly handled
The useful question is not accuracy. It is which ones to check.
Any categorization engine will get some assignments wrong. What matters is whether it tells you which ones it is unsure about, so your review time goes to the handful that need it instead of the whole ledger.
Every transaction carries a confidence band. High-confidence assignments post straight through. Anything in the review band is held in a queue that takes minutes rather than an afternoon, and anything genuinely ambiguous is never guessed into a category silently.
See how corrections surface in reportingConfidence bands and what happens in each
High confidence
A known merchant with consistent history, or a match on a rule you wrote. Posts to the category immediately and moves the tracker.
Review band
A plausible assignment with a credible alternative. Posts to the category so your tracking stays current, and lands in the review queue marked with both candidates so you can confirm or switch in one action.
Unresolved
A first-time merchant with no usable pattern. Held in Uncategorized, counted against the period total but never silently charged to a category it might not belong to.
The review queue is a working surface, not a backlog. Bulk-confirm a merchant, write a rule from a correction, or split one transaction across two categories when a single invoice genuinely covers both.
Override control
Your correction is the final word, and it persists.
Correct one, or correct the pattern
Change a single transaction and only that transaction moves. Choose to apply it to the merchant and every past and future transaction from that merchant follows, with the historical restatement shown before you commit it.
Split when one charge is two expenses
A single supplier invoice covering supplies and contractors can be split by amount or percentage across categories. Both halves track independently and the split is preserved in the audit trail.
Every change is recorded
Who recategorized what, from which category to which, when, and whether a rule was created from it. Your reports stay defensible because the path from transaction to category is never a black box.
Categorization reads your transactions. It never touches them.
Account connections are read-only. The engine ingests settled transaction data to assign categories and nothing else. It cannot initiate a payment, reverse a charge or alter a bank record, because it has no write access to do it with.
Elsewhere in the engine
Category Budget Tracking
Live spend against every category limit, with status the moment it changes.
OpenCash Flow Forecasting
Where the month lands if current spend velocity holds.
OpenApproval Workflows
Route spend and reallocation decisions to the person who owns the budget.
OpenSpend Reports
Variance to budget by category, period over period, export ready.
OpenPick your month end
There are only two ways to find out you went over budget.
One of them still lets you do something about it.
The statement routeDay 31
You read the number after it is spent
The category closed at 112 percent. The money left the account three weeks ago. The only decision available now is which line to explain it against.
- Overage discovered at close
- Reallocation window already gone
- Next cycle starts on the same blind footing
The BudgetGaga routeDay 11
You read the pace while it still bends
At 74 percent on day 11 the category is flagged as trending over, with an under-spent line named as the source. You approve the shift, or you tighten the spend. Either way you chose.
- Flagged the moment the pace breaks
- Reallocation source named, not hunted for
- Every move still waits on your approval