Payees
Why your bank's garbled merchant name becomes something readable.
A payee is who you paid, or who paid you. PennyBolt uses payees to group transactions across accounts and dates: every time you pay Blue Bottle Coffee, those transactions are linked by the same payee name regardless of what your bank called it.
Merchant normalization
Banks send garbled merchant strings: “SQ *BLUE BOTTLE 0412 BROOKLYN NY” instead of “Blue Bottle Coffee.” PennyBolt cleans these up automatically during import. The raw description from your bank is preserved in the transaction memo; the readable name is what you see in the register.
This normalization happens on import and can’t be undone for existing transactions, but you can always rename a payee and all past transactions update immediately.
Payee rules
A payee rule tells PennyBolt what to do when it sees a matching transaction: assign a specific category, rename the payee, or both. Write a rule once and every matching transaction — imported in the past or in the future — follows it.
The full detail on writing and managing rules is in Payee rules .
See also
- Payee rules — write a rule once, apply it everywhere.
- Transactions — each transaction has one payee.
- Categories — rules assign categories to payees.