Auto-categorization

The dullest part of bookkeeping is picking the same category over and over for the same shop. Svodly fills it in for you — from your rules or simply from the counterparty’s history. The suggestion is soft: it is a hint, not a decision made for you. Pick a category by hand and the suggestion quietly steps aside.

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A new transaction: pick a counterparty and the category fills itself in, with a caption underneath telling you where it came from (“Set by a counterparty rule — feel free to change”).

Same on the phone: the counterparty is chosen, the category is filled in, and the source caption sits under the field. Choosing a category by hand removes it.

How Svodly picks the category

The chain is simple — first match wins:

Your “counterparty → category” rule. The most precise one: the counterparty is already stated in the transaction.
Your “words in the description → category” rule. It saves the day when there is no counterparty but the transaction name carries a recognisable word.
Counterparty history — its most frequent category in this book. This works with no setup at all: file “Magnit” under “Groceries” five times and the sixth time Svodly will suggest it itself.

The caption under the category field always states the source: “Set by a counterparty rule”, “…by a keyword rule” or “…from counterparty history”. The moment you pick a category yourself the caption disappears — from then on the field is yours and no suggestion will overwrite it. Switching the transaction type (expense ↔ income) also clears the hint.

Works without setup

The third step of the chain needs nothing — it is always on. Rules are worth creating where there is no history yet (a brand-new counterparty), where the history is “dirty” (you visit one shop both for groceries and for household chemicals), or where there will be no counterparty at all — for instance when importing a bank statement.

A rule by counterparty

A plain mapping “this payee is always this category”: “Pyaterochka” → “Groceries”, “Yandex Go” → “Taxi”, “Rigla” → “Pharmacy”. Such a rule fires before history, which makes it a handy way to “re-teach” a counterparty whose category has changed.

A rule by words in the description

Here the condition is one or several keywords. It is enough for any of them to match.

Matching happens at the start of a word: “rent” catches both “rent” and “rental payment”, but not “subrent” — there “rent” is not at the beginning of the word. That lets you write the stem once instead of listing every inflection.

Keywords look at the transaction description — what a statement calls the “payment purpose”. That is exactly why such rules shine on bank statement import.

The rule editor

On the desktop and on the web it is the “Categories” section, the “Auto-category rules” tab next to “Categories”. The Rule button in the header opens the rule card.

On the phone it is “Categories” → Auto-categorization rules in the header; that opens the “Category rules” screen with a New rule button.

The rule list is the same everywhere: a card with the target category tile in its own colour, the name and a toggle on top, condition chips below and the condition type in the footer. Rules whose counterparty or category has been deleted are dimmed and labelled — they do not fire until you fix the condition.

Categories → the “Auto-category rules” tab → “Rule”: pick the condition (a counterparty or words) and the target category — and the rule shows up as a card in the list.

On the phone: “Categories” → “Auto-categorization rules” → “New rule” — the same form as a sliding sheet.

The direction of a rule

A rule has no separate “expense/income” switch — the direction comes from the type of the target category. A rule with an expense category will never fire on income, and vice versa. That is why identical keywords can happily live in two rules — one for expense, one for income.

The “Rule enabled” toggle

A disabled rule stays in the list but suggests nothing. Handy when a rule has to be paused for a while — say while you sort out an old statement — without losing its condition.

Apply to past transactions

Right after a rule is saved Svodly counts how many transactions without a category already match its condition and offers to apply the rule to them: “42 transactions without a category in this book match this rule. Apply it to them?”.

Only transactions without a category are touched — whatever you have already sorted by hand is never rewritten.
The changes are ordinary: they land in history and sync just like a manual edit.
You can decline with “Not now” — the rule is saved anyway and will work for new transactions.

Conflicting rules

Svodly will not let you create two rules where only one of them could ever fire — otherwise it would be a mystery why the “wrong” category keeps appearing. Two cases are checked on save:

A second rule on the same counterparty in the same direction.
Overlapping keyword stems: “rent” and “rental” catch the same transactions, because matching starts at the beginning of a word.

In both cases saving is rejected with a clear message naming both the word and the conflicting rule with its category. Disabled rules take part in the check too — otherwise switching an old rule back on would give you a hidden duplicate.

Where else rules fire

Manual transaction entry — on the desktop, on the web and on the phone.
Scanning an FNS receipt — the seller from the receipt immediately yields a category, leaving you only to save the purchase.
Bank statement import — your rules take precedence over both counterparty history and the built-in payment-purpose dictionary. This is the fastest way to sort hundreds of rows in one go.

Rules and sync

Rules are part of the book: they sync through Svodly Cloud together with the rest of the data, land in backups and in exports. Set them up on the computer — they work on the phone. In a book with shared access the rules are common to everyone.

Where to go next

Categories & counterparties — what exactly the rules fill in.
Transactions — the entry form where all of this shows up.
Import & export — sorting a statement with rules.
Receipt purchases — what a well-sorted FNS receipt gives you.