This is something that has been bothering me for a while. I checked for related forum threads but it seems no-one else has asked this. I’ve also checked the guide.
Context
I regularly have transactions with the phrase “Int Tran Fee” (international transaction fee). These are accompanied by another transaction for a bill that I’ve paid.
e.g.
8th August 2024 – VISA-COMPANY NAME, INC. US - 111222 – $100.00
8th August 2024 – Int Tran Fee - COMPANY NAME, INC. US - 333444 – $5.00
This means I was billed $100.00, but my bank then charged me an extra $5.00 for currency conversion. This is how they represent it on the transaction history.
Payment Rules
I have a Payment Rule that marks “Int Tran Fee” as a bank fee, and “Company Name” as something more suited to that company (e.g. software expenses).
The Problem
My problem is that when I’m importing my bank statement and looking at uncategorised payments, some of the “Int Tran Fee” transactions correctly get detected as being bank charges, but others falsely get detected based on the company name instead.
Question
How can I force “Int Tran Fee” to always be the highest priority above everything else, so that if that is in the name of the transaction it always takes priority and marks the suspense items as a bank fee?
Hmm, interesting idea. Haven’t tested it … I’ve just found an alternative:
After doing some more reading, it occurred to me to play around with the length of the matching string after reading this:
The string “Int Tran Fee” is 12 characters in length. As long as the supplier payment rule that it matches on is less than 12 characters, it seems to prefer matching on “Int Tran Fee” instead - which means that it defaults to being a bank charge (as I’d like it to do).
I will need to take note when it classifies it incorrectly in the future … and then edit the supplier payment rule to be something that is less than 12 characters long.
Minor rant / change request
The problem is that this ‘feature’ is completely hidden and undiscoverable by users within the app directly. It would be nice if this was exposed as an actual field (e.g. a ‘priority’ field on Bank Rules that is considered when more than one rule is a valid match).
If I had to match on something super short like “ABC”, the workaround I described above would not be suitable. I’m also unsure what would happen if the supplier payment rule was exactly 12 characters as well - which one does it choose in that scenario?
