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Merchants represent the businesses and entities you transact with. Commander uses merchants to group related transactions and to automate budget line assignment for recurring spending.

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How merchants appear

Commander creates merchants automatically in two scenarios:
  • During transaction creation—when you enter a merchant name that does not match any existing merchant, Commander creates a new merchant when you save the transaction.
  • During Plaid import—when Commander imports transactions from your bank, it creates merchants for any new business names that appear in the imported data.

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Merchant properties

  • Display name—the name shown throughout the app. You can rename a merchant at any time.
  • Matching transaction names—a list of transaction name patterns that Commander uses to match imported transactions to this merchant. This allows multiple name variations from different banks to map to a single merchant.

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Linking merchants to budget lines

You can link a merchant to a budget line from the merchant detail page. Once linked, any new transaction created with that merchant automatically fills in the linked budget line. This applies to both manually created transactions and future imports from Plaid. Linking affects future transactions only—existing transactions already assigned to other budget lines are not reassigned.

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Merchant activity

The merchant detail page displays activity metrics including transaction count, average transaction amount, the interval between transactions, and the date of the most recent transaction. A transaction list shows all transactions associated with the merchant across all accounts.