Understanding Rules

Learn how automation rules save time by categorizing transactions automatically

Rules let you automate transaction organization. When a new transaction matches your conditions, Financio automatically applies categories, tags, or renames the merchant - saving you from repetitive manual work.

How Rules Work

Each rule has two parts:

  1. Conditions - What to look for (merchant name, description, or both)
  2. Actions - What to do when a match is found (set category, add tags, rename merchant)

When you add a new transaction, Financio checks it against your rules in order. If a transaction matches a rule's conditions, the rule's actions are applied automatically.

Example Rules

Grocery shopping

Condition: Merchant contains "Woolworths" or "Coles" Action: Set category to "Groceries"

Every supermarket transaction is automatically categorised without any effort.

Work expenses

Condition: Description contains "CORP CARD" Action: Add tag "Work", set category to "Work Expenses"

Business expenses from a corporate card are tagged and categorised together for easy reporting.

Clean up merchant names

Condition: Merchant contains "UBER *EATS" Action: Rename merchant to "Uber Eats", set category to "Take Away"

Messy bank descriptions become clean, readable merchant names.

Rule Priority

Rules are processed in order from top to bottom. If multiple rules match a transaction, all matching rules are applied.

You can reorder rules to control which ones take priority. For example, you might want a specific "Uber Eats" rule to run before a general "Uber" rule.

When Rules Apply

Rules are checked:

  • When you create a new transaction manually
  • When transactions are imported
  • When creating a rule with "Apply to existing transactions" enabled
  • When you click Run now on an existing rule

Rules Don't Override Manual Changes

If you manually change a transaction's category or tags after a rule has been applied, your manual changes are preserved.