Rules

Category rules are a powerful feature that allows you to automatically categorize transactions based on your specific business needs. They are a key part of the BudgetBadger Business categorization system and are used to ensure that your transactions are categorized consistently and your P&L and analyses are as accurate as possible.

Rules will automatically assign a category when new synced transactions match your criteria (e.g. merchant name matches certain criteria) and is the highest priority categorization method.

There are two ways to create category rules in BudgetBadger:

1. Pressing Create on the Rules page and filling out the form with your desired criteria and target category.
2. Changing a transaction category on the Transactions page and pressing Create Rule in the popup that appears in the bottom right of the screen.

You can edit, reorder, and delete rules from the list on the Rules page.

We recommend starting with a few high-confidence merchants (revenue payment platforms, software subscriptions, contractors, rent, etc.) before building a large rule library. Over time, you can add more rules to cover additional merchants and transaction types, which increasingly helps automate your data categorization over time.

The Run and Run All buttons on the Rules page allow you to immediately recategorize past transactions already in your BudgetBadger account based on your active rules. Use Run on a single rule to recategorize past transactions that match. Use the Run All button to run your full active rule set against all historical transactions. This is particularly helpful during the setup process to quickly clean your transaction data.

Once you run your rules, you can then navigate to the Transactions page and review a sample of results afterward to ensure your rules are working as intended.