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 and look at the Bank accounts tile: a red alert icon means transactions are waiting. Click through and each account shows how many uncategorised transactions it has, with a Categorise button to work down them. Once an account is clear, the card shows Reconciled with the date instead — that's the satisfying bit.
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.
Flag anything you're unsure about
Click ··· on the row and choose Flag. A flag is just a marker — it carries no reason, and stub never sets one for you.
Filter the list by Flagged to pull them all up later, and use them as a "come back to this" list — the transaction you need to ask your accountant about, or the one you still need a receipt for.
Split a transaction across categories
One payment covering two things? See Split transactions across categories.
Teach stub your own rules
On a premium plan 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.