User Guide » Categories » Categorising Transactions

Categorising Transactions

When you create or edit transactions, you can categorise them.

Transaction Categories help you more clearly analyse your profit & loss, and see which products, services, or sources of income contribute the most to your business.

You can create custom categories for Sales and Expenses… and you can create as many of these as you like, however you like, to best match your business. If you sell postage stamps, for example, you might want to create a category called Sales > Postage Stamps – and another category called Expenses > Cost of Postage Stamps Purchased.


 

Automatic Categorisation

One of the most powerful aspects of 10 Minute Accounts is the ability to automatically categorise transactions. Where possible, 10 Minute Accounts, will use the way you’ve categorised transactions in the past to automatically categorise new transactions.

Automatic Categorisations are applied to trasactions that are either imported, or are synced from your PayPal account.

You don’t need to enable this functionality; it happens automatically, as you teach 10 Minute Accounts what your transactions are.

Here’s how it works:

How to set up a new Auto-Categorisation [Example]

  1. Click on Transactions in the main menu
  2. Click the current Category Name for the transaction you want to re-categorise
    • This might be currently “Sales > General Sales” or “Uncategorised” for example
  3. Select the Transaction Category, or select ‘CREATE A NEW CATEGORY’
    • You can create new categories for Sales and Expenses transactions
  4. Enter the new Category Name, if needed
  5. To automatically apply this categorisation to other transactions, select “Apply To: All matching transactions”
    • This will auto-categorise all transactions with a similar Description
    • Auto-categorisations will continue to work into the future too – so once you’ve categorised a few transactions, the software ‘learns’ how you categorise, and does it automatically for you!
  6. Save the transaction, and your categorisation will take effect… both for this transaction and other matching transactions

All done! Verify that your transactions are correctly categorised, and you’re set to go