🏷️ Categorizing Transactions

You stay in control of how transactions are categorized, and you can always see exactly why each one landed where it did. Three things assign categories:

• Built-in patterns — StatementLock recognizes common recurring and national-chain merchants out of the box: income (Social Security, pension, payroll), credit-card payments, and familiar names like Netflix, Costco, Shell, Kroger, and Amazon. These land in the right category the moment you import. If you’d rather use only your own rules, turn them off in Insights → Built-in Merchant Patterns. Everything they categorized moves to Uncategorized until your rules cover it — except card payments, which stay recognized so your totals don’t count them as spending twice.

• Your rules — Everything else starts as Uncategorized until you make a quick rule. Claude AI reads your statement PDFs to pull out each transaction's date, description, and amount, but it does not assign the spending category — that's done by the built-in patterns and by rules you create. So every category traces back to a pattern or a rule you can inspect and change.

• The category you set yourself — Click any transaction's category to change it, or to add a new category right there. A category you set by hand applies to that one transaction and outranks the patterns and rules, so nothing you add later quietly changes it. The transaction is labeled Set by you, and you can hand it back to automatic categorization at any time.

Seeing a batch of Uncategorized transactions on a fresh import is normal — it's the long tail of local shops, restaurants, and one-off purchases. A handful of rules turns most of them into permanent categories. The Categories tab gathers all your Uncategorized transactions into one card — open it to work through them in one place.

To categorize one transaction, click its category (in the Transactions or Categories tab) and pick from the list — or choose + New category… and type a name, which creates the category and applies it in one step. After it's applied, StatementLock offers to turn it into a rule; you can take that or skip it.

To categorize by rule, click 🔧 New on any transaction. It opens the Rule Builder, where you click words to build an exact match. You can also add rules directly in the Insights tab → Keyword Rules.

Rules stick. Once you create one, it applies to every matching transaction — past and future — and survives reloads, folder switches, and reprocessing. You categorize once, and it stays done.