Reconciliation rules

Categorisation rules for Estonian bank transactions: match repeating payments like bank fees or phone bills once, and they skip the review queue for good.

Some transactions never need judgement. Telia is always the phone bill, the bank's monthly service charge is always a bank fee, and deciding this afresh every month is not a good use of anyone's time. A rule captures the pattern once — a condition matched against incoming transactions, plus the category to apply — and from then on those transactions are categorised the moment they arrive, skipping the review queue entirely.

Rules live under Banking → Rules, where you can see every rule, what it matches and where it posts.

The anatomy of a rule

Part	What it does
Rule name	A label for the list, e.g. "Telia phone bill"
Match field	Which part of the transaction to look at: the description, the paid to/from name, the payment reference or the counterparty IBAN
Match type	Contains, exact match or starts with — all case-insensitive
Match value	The text to look for, e.g. "TELIA"
Category	The income or expense category to apply, which determines the account the transaction is posted to
Priority	The rule's place in the queue — lower numbers are checked first
Active	Only active rules are applied; unticking pauses a rule without deleting it

Creating a rule

Start a new rule

Go to Banking → Rules and select New Rule. It helps to have the transaction you're targeting open in All Transactions at the same time, so you can copy the exact text the bank uses.

Describe what to match

Pick the field and the text. The paid to/from name is usually the steadiest choice — counterparty names rarely change, while descriptions and references often vary from one payment to the next. The IBAN is steadier still, when the same account is always involved.

Choose where it posts

Select the category, give the rule a priority and leave it active. Save, and the rule applies to matching transactions from the next import onwards.

How rules are applied

Rules run automatically whenever transactions arrive — on every bank sync and every CSV import, before auto-matching has its turn. Active rules are checked in priority order, lowest number first, and the first rule that matches wins, so two rules can never fight over the same transaction. A matched transaction gets its category, is marked as done and never appears in Needs Attention.

Rules only ever touch transactions that are still in Needs review. Anything already matched, categorised or excluded is left alone, so a new rule cannot rewrite history.

💡Leave gaps in your priorities

Numbering rules 10, 20, 30 rather than 1, 2, 3 leaves room to slot a specific rule above a general one later — for instance, an exact-IBAN rule at 10 catching one supplier before a broad "description contains" rule at 20 sweeps up the rest.

Seeing what a rule has done

There is no separate per-rule activity log; the place to check a rule's work is All Transactions. Filter to Matched and search for the counterparty — transactions the rule handled show as Done with the rule's category in the category column. If one was caught wrongly, Undo Categorise on the row sends it back to Needs review, and the rule itself can be adjusted or deleted from its row menu on the Rules page — or paused by unticking Active.

A rule that matches too eagerly usually has a match value that's too short, or a "contains" that wanted to be "exact"; tightening the value or switching to the counterparty IBAN narrows it down.

A rule, or a recurring expense?

Both deal with costs that repeat, from opposite ends:

A rule is bookkeeping after the fact. It categorises what the bank statement already shows; nothing exists in Arvello until the money has moved. It fits charges where the statement line is the whole story — bank fees, card charges, small subscriptions without a meaningful invoice.
A recurring expense template works ahead of the bank. It creates the expense record itself on schedule, with the supplier and VAT details attached, and the bank transaction is then matched against that expense during reconciliation. It fits proper monthly supplier invoices, where there's VAT to track and a document behind the payment — see Recurring expenses.

A reasonable test: if you'd never ask the supplier for an invoice, a rule does the job; if there's an invoice with VAT on it, a recurring expense keeps the paper trail intact.