Every transaction has to land somewhere — this was a sale, that was fuel, that was rent — because every report stub gives you is built by adding those categories up. A transaction with no category is invisible to your Profit & Loss and to your tax numbers.
The good news is that you are not doing that from scratch. When transactions are uploaded or synced into stub, stub categorises them for you. It works from what it already knows about your business:
- Your chart of accounts. stub matches the transaction against the income and expense accounts you actually use, rather than a generic list.
- How you've categorised before. Once you've told stub that a payment to a particular supplier is fuel, the next one arrives already categorised as fuel. The more you correct it, the better it gets.
- Your open invoices. Money in that matches an invoice you've sent is matched to that invoice, which settles it and marks it paid — instead of being dropped into a generic income account.
- Your open bills. Money out that matches a bill is matched to that bill, so the bill is settled and the expense sits against the right supplier.
So most of a bank feed lands categorised. What's left is the genuinely ambiguous stuff — a new supplier, an odd once-off, a payment that could be two different things. That's the bit that needs you, and it's a short list.
Check what stub couldn't categorise
Uncategorised transactions are the number-one reason reports look wrong, so this is the one habit worth keeping.
Your dashboard tells you when there are any. Go to Insights: each bank account's tile shows how many transactions on it are still uncategorised, in red. Click the tile to open Account Recon for that account and work through them there — see Reconcile your bank accounts.
Work from Sales and Expenses
The dashboard tells you there's something to do. Sales and Expenses are where you actually manage transactions — everything below happens on those pages.
To categorise, click the category on any row and pick the one it belongs to — Consulting income, Office costs, Advertising — without opening the transaction. On an income row you can also pick the invoice it settles; on an expense row, the bill.
Filter the list by Uncategorised to pull up only what still needs attention, and save that filter as a view so it's one click tomorrow.
Check the tax on a transaction
If you have Sales Tax turned on, check the rate on the transaction while you're categorising it. stub carries over the rate it expects, but a wrong rate is invisible until the return is due — getting it right as you go is what makes your VAT report correct at the end of the period. See Add VAT to income and expenses.
Deal with duplicates
When stub spots what looks like the same transaction twice, the row's ··· menu offers two extra actions:
- Remove duplicate — bin the copy.
- Confirm income or Confirm expense — tell stub it's genuinely a separate transaction.
Check flagged transactions
stub flags a transaction itself when it isn't confident about the category it picked, or when that category would keep the money off your Profit & Loss — an expense posted to an asset account, say. Income stub matched to a customer is flagged too, so you can confirm the match. The transaction still posts; the flag asks you to check it. Open it and the note at the top says why it was flagged.
You can flag anything yourself as well: click ··· on the row and choose Flag. Choose it again to clear a flag, whoever set it.
Filter the list by Flagged to pull up every flag — stub's and yours — and use it as a "come back to this" list: the category stub wasn't sure of, the transaction you need to ask your accountant about, or the one you still need a receipt for.
Suspected duplicates are marked separately, with an alert icon on the row — see Deal with duplicates above.
Split a transaction across categories
One payment covering two things? See Split transactions across categories.
Teach stub your own rules
On Steady Startup and up you can go further than stub's own matching and write rules of your own, on top of the standard set stub maintains. They live under Settings → AI.
Tip: Do this weekly rather than annually. Ten minutes on a Friday beats a lost weekend in February.