How does automatic categorization work?

Every transaction that arrives in Bilance — from a bank connection, a CSV import, or manual entry — gets a cleaned title and a category automatically. “CARD PURCHASE 12345 AMAZON EU SARL” becomes “Amazon” in the right category, without you doing anything.

What happens when a transaction syncs

1. The title is cleaned. Raw bank descriptions are turned into readable merchant names, so your feed says Amazon or Bolt instead of a terminal code.
2. A category is assigned. Bilance picks from your categories — the built-in set plus any custom categories you’ve created.

This happens the moment transactions arrive, so your Dashboard feed is always a readable record, not a pile of raw bank data waiting to be sorted.

Correcting a category teaches Bilance

No automatic system gets everything right, especially for your local shops and personal transfers. When a category is wrong, change it. Bilance learns from the correction, so the same merchant lands in the right category next time. After a correction or two, your gym, your landlord, and your corner store are always right.

To fix many transactions at once, use bulk editing. If one purchase belongs in two categories — say a supermarket run that was half groceries, half household — you can split it.

Transfers between your own accounts

Money moving between your own accounts is recognized as an internal transfer, a separate transaction type that never counts as spending or income. See transaction types for how the types differ.

Why it matters

Categories are what the rest of Bilance is built on: the Overview charts, budgets, and AI Chat answers are only as good as the categories underneath them. A quick correction when you spot a miss keeps everything downstream accurate — a 15-second glance instead of the hour of manual sorting other tools ask for.