Categorise bank transactions on a schedule

Every business transaction needs a category before you can see profit, prepare a tax return or answer a simple question such as what you spent on software last quarter. The IRS notes that for most small businesses the business checking account is the main source for entries in the business books. HMRC asks self-employed people to keep records of all sales and income and all business expenses, and to make sure they can identify business transactions. The work is easy but repetitive: read the payee, recall what it was, pick a category. That is why it slips, and why a catch-up of a few months turns into days of clicking.

You add the job and give it read access to the accounting tool or bank feed that holds your transactions, plus your category list, a review threshold and the date to catch up from. Organ builds the connection with read access; until it is in place the job waits, paused. A scheduled business analyst agent then runs every week. Each run covers transactions since the last run, starting from your catch-up date, so the earliest run carries the backlog. It drafts one category per line, using your category list and any example payees you add to it. Anything it is unsure about, anything above your threshold and anything unusual, such as a new payee or a likely duplicate, is flagged rather than guessed. The run ends with a short summary of spend by category. Its department head reviews the run before it reaches you, and you approve, edit or skip each draft.

Say a design studio has 420 uncategorised lines from the last three months and uses eight categories. The catch-up run drafts categories for the lines it can match with confidence and flags the rest: an unfamiliar payee, a transfer that could be owner drawings or a loan repayment, and anything over $500. The owner reviews the drafts, spends most of the attention on the flagged lines, and corrects a handful. Adding those payees to the category list as examples helps later weekly runs. These figures are illustrative, not measured results.

The job reads; it does not change your books or your bank. You keep the final say on every category and on anything that looks like a personal expense or a tax question, which belongs with your accountant. If you would rather not connect anything yet, attach a CSV export to a one-off task in Organ to clear the backlog, then add the weekly job once a connection with read access is in place. If unpaid invoices are the other cash task on your list, see the overdue invoice follow-up job linked below.