What a matching rule is
A matching rule is a hard instruction the engine checks on every new bank transaction, before anything else: if the transaction looks like X, then categorise it as Y (or: ignore it). Rules are evaluated in priority order, the first match wins, and every time a rule fires it is recorded in your audit trail.
Rules sit at the very top of the pecking order:
- Your rules — always win.
- Learned knowledge — what the system has learned from your corrections.
- AI suggestion — the model's own guess, shown as an accept-chip, never auto-applied.
Before you ask for a rule: you probably don't need one
For the classic cases — "AWS is always Infrastructure", "Stripe payouts are always Revenue" — vendor learning already does this without any setup. Correct or confirm the category two or three times and the learned category is pre-filled on every future invoice and transaction from that vendor, per company. That covers most of what people historically built rules for.
Rules earn their keep for the cases learning can't express:
- Ignore rules — e.g. permanently ignore a specific internal counterparty so it never shows up as open work.
- Overrides — when a vendor must land in a category different from what you usually pick elsewhere, no exceptions.
How to get a rule today
There is currently no rule-builder screen in the app — rules are configured on the backend, per company. If you have a case that learning doesn't cover:
- Write to [email protected] with the condition ("counterparty contains …", "IBAN equals …") and the action (category or ignore).
- We set the rule up for your company and confirm.
- From then on it fires on every new transaction, visible in your activity trail.
A self-serve rule builder is on the roadmap; this article will be updated when it ships.
Troubleshooting
A rule seems to fire on the wrong transactions. Rules match exactly what their condition says — tell support the transaction that was hit and we adjust the condition or its priority.
My counterparty IBAN condition isn't firing even though the IBAN matches. IBAN normalisation strips spaces and uppercases. If your statement file has IBANs with non-standard formatting (BIC mixed in, country code missing), a counterparty-name condition is usually the more robust choice.
Related articles
- How matching learns from you — the no-setup alternative that covers most cases
- How the matching pipeline works — where rules sit in the engine
- Why this matched — and how to undo — explanations and undo