Use payment rules to categorize imported transactions

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Payment rules are decision criteria you define so Manager can automatically categorize or post payments to correct accounts and payees when you import bank statements. Procedures for importing statements are described in another Guide.

Define, edit, or delete a payment rule

Payment rules can be defined, edited, or deleted in the Settings tab after clicking Payment Rules:

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To define a new payment rule, click New Payment Rule and complete the description:

• Select the bank account to which the rule will apply under If bank account is:. Or, leave the default entry, Suspense, when the rule will apply across all your bank accounts.
• Enter any financial search criteria under …and amount is:. The default is Any amount. Aternatives include:
  
  
  
  
• Enter any descriptive search criteria under …and description contains:. This must be a literal string. Multiple criteria can be included by clicking Add line. Multiple criteria are evaluated as a Boolean AND operation, meaning all criteria must be contained in the description.
• Choose the Payee involved in the transaction. To do this, first select the payee type as Customer, Supplier, or Other. If Customer or Supplier is selected, customers and suppliers already defined in the Customers or Suppliers tabs will be available. If Other is selected, the field is free text, and any name can be entered:
  
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• Specify the posting Account.
• Tax Code and Division can be selected if any have been defined and an applicable account has been chosen. Otherwise, those fields do not appear.
• Checkboxes for Column — Description and Column — Qty cause corresponding fields to appear. Otherwise, those fields are absent, as shown in the illustration above.

Notes
When a control account is selected, such as Accounts payable, an additional dropdown field will appear beside the account field to select a subsidiary ledger, such as the supplier. If a subsidiary ledger is not selected, transactions fitting the search criteria will be posted to Suspense.

Example
Xuan sees that international wire transfer fees always show the same way in her bank statements. So she creates a payment rule directing all payments from her Main business account containing NAB INTL TRAN FEE in their descriptions to be categorized under her Bank charges expense account. Such transactions are not taxable in Xuan’s jurisdiction:

Click Create when finished. The rule will appear in the list of payment rules in the Settings tab:

To edit or delete a payment rule, click the Edit button beside the rule. Edit as desired and click Update or click Delete.

Define a payment rule during categorization

After a bank import is complete, Manager returns you to the Bank and Cash Accounts tab. Here, you will see a column for Uncategorized Payments:

Transactions in that column have not yet been finally categorized. They are temporarily posted to the Suspense account. To define new payment rules while categorizing those payments, click on the number in the Uncategorized Payments column. Then click New Payment Rule on the line for which you want to define a new rule.

You should create rules for all payments likely to recur, being careful not to include in the rules any transaction details that are unique, such as reference numbers, invoice numbers, or dates. Once-off transactions that are infrequent should be categorized individually by clicking Edit rather than by creating rules. Payments you edit manually will disappear from the bulk categorization screen.

Once you have added all your payment rules, select all transactions matched by new rules by checking their boxes. Click Batch Update at the bottom. All selected payments with matching rules will be recategorized and taken off the list. Payment rules you created will be saved in the Settings tab, so when you import bank statements again, Manager will match new payments to existing payment rules, reducing the time needed to categorize them.

Caution
The possibility always exists that a payment rule will incorrectly categorize a transaction with unanticipated characteristics. When you complete the categorization process, review the results.