Payees, default categories, and auto-import

What a payee carries

A payee is more than a name. It can hold a Default Category, a set of Matching Texts that recognise it in bank descriptions, a brand logo, an Active switch, and optionally an auto-import rule. You start with 21 common ones (Tesco, Netflix, Octopus Energy and friends), all wired with matching texts and nearly all with a sensible default category.

The default category, and the suggestion ladder

When you pick a payee on a transaction, Endute pre-fills the category using a ladder: the payee's default category first, then the category you last used with that payee in the past six months. Your three most frequent choices also appear at the top of the category dropdown under a Suggestions heading. Your own manual pick always wins, and changing the payee re-runs the ladder for the new one.

So the highest-leverage habit on this page: give your twenty most common payees a default category. Everything downstream, from bank import suggestions to auto-import, builds on it.

Matching Texts: teaching the importer

Bank descriptions rarely say "Amazon"; they say things like AMZN Mktpl. The Matching Texts field takes comma-separated snippets, and any imported transaction whose description contains one gets this payee suggested. Endute also learns silently: confirm a payee for a bank description once, and the same description suggests the same payee next time.

Auto-import: skipping the review queue

A payee with a default category can be promoted to an Auto-import rule (the switch lives in the edit dialog). Matching bank transactions then skip the review queue entirely and land in your ledger with the default category applied. Payees with an active rule show an amber lightning icon on the Payees page, and a summary card counts what was auto-imported in the last 30 days.

The sparkles in the review queue

During transaction review, suggestion sparkles carry a colour code. Blue marks a suggestion pointing at a payee you already have, drawn from your history, your rules, or the community's. A green sparkle marks a suggested brand-new payee: enough other Endute users confirmed this same bank text as a given merchant, or our enrichment recognised it, and the row notes the payee will be created on import. Accept it and the payee is created for you; pick anything else and the suggestion steps aside. Community learning works on anonymised fingerprints of bank text, never on anything traceable to another user.

The Undefined payee

Processing a transaction without any payee is allowed; a confirmation titled Missing Payee checks it was intentional, and the transaction is filed under an auto-created payee named Undefined. It is an ordinary payee you can inspect like any other, which makes it a useful to-do list: its transaction history is exactly the pile you have not attributed yet.

Renaming, deactivating, deleting

• Renaming a payee carries its whole history with it, no migration needed.
• Deactivating a payee stops it being suggested during bank import and hides it from the payee pickers, without touching history; existing transactions keep it, and reports still show it. Right for one-off merchants you will never see again.
• Deleting removes the payee from its transactions; the transactions themselves stay, unassigned, and a payee with history asks for an explicit second confirmation before going. There is no merge feature yet, so the tidy-up for duplicates is: reassign the transactions to the keeper, then delete the empty duplicate.

Bulk operations exist for the common cases: select several payees and Bulk Edit can set their active status or default category in one pass.

Brand logos

Logos make lists scannable. When you type a new payee's name, Endute quietly suggests a matching brand; the Find Logo button searches by name when nothing was found, Change swaps a wrong guess, and initials stand in where no logo exists.

What next

Payees and categories are the two halves of automatic categorisation. With both tuned, the review queue becomes a quick confirm rather than a chore, and budgets get trustworthy numbers for free.