What are some best practices regarding the creation of Categorization rules in Cloud Banking?
So you wanna make a categorization rule in Cloud Banking? Awesome! Let us give you some tips for rule creation that will make your rules blow your efficiency right through the roof!
How to choose a pattern
Pay close attention to the pattern. Pick something specific enough to exclude unwanted transactions, but general enough to catch the ones you want. Clear as mud? Let us give you some examples.
Let's say the description that comes through from the bank is 12/19 PANDA EXPRESS #112 SAN FRANCISCO CA US
If you leave it like it is,
• it can't possibly match again until 12/19 of next year so let's remove the date.
• if we leave the #112, it will only match Store #112.
• if we leave in the SAN FRANCISCO, CA US it will only match Panda Express in San Francisco.
SO
PANDA EXPRESS is the most appropriate answer here unless...
You have a different vendor entry for each Panda Store, in which case the most appropriate answer would be...
PANDA EXPRESS #112
Or you track Panda Express locations by city and then then answer would be
PANDA EXPRESS SAN FRANCISCO
In each of the above conditions, you'd want to choose the contains operator as none of the patterns start with 12/19.
See, now you're getting it!
Other Tips
- The Auto-Approve feature is killer-cool-awesome but you may wish to monitor the rule a bit to ensure that it's catching only the transactions that you want, nothing more. Remember, you can always go back in a modify a rule so it doesn't have to be perfect the first time. What's the Auto-Approve feature, you ask? Well with this feature turned on, all matching transactions will have the account, vendor, project and class coded for you and approved which means created and done! You can sit back and watch the game as your accounting program does the work for you.
- Want similar rules to operate slightly differently for different accounts? Check! Here's an example to illustrate this one:
Our client owns three donut stores (I know, I'm sorry now I want a donut too!). Each donut store has its own checking account, but the client manages all three stores in one CustomBooks™ account and separates the transactions out by using classes. When a transaction comes in from his sugar distributor, the rule differs for each donut store - the class is different for each one. By using the Apply to specific bank account feature (look below the Save and close button), our client can create three rules, one for each account/store to code the correct class. How cool is that?
- Annoyed by the window constantly popping up when you're never going to want to create a rule? Click the DO NOT CATEGORIZE checkbox and the pop-up window will be banished forever for the description match in question.
- Rules are case-INsensitive. Meaning PANDA EXPRESS = panda express = Panda Express.