How Administry Categorizes Your Transactions

The Problem We Solve

For most small business owners, bookkeeping works like this: bank statements pile up, a CPA or bookkeeper does a cleanup session every few months (or at year-end), and everyone is stressed about the state of the books.

Administry inverts this. We connect to your bank accounts and categorize transactions on an ongoing basis — so your books are always current, not months behind.

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How We Connect to Your Bank

Administry connects to your business bank accounts via Plaid, a secure bank connection service used by thousands of financial applications. The connection is read-only — we can see your transactions, but we cannot move money.

Bank Connection Process

1. During onboarding, you'll be prompted to connect your business bank account(s)
2. You authenticate through your bank's own login (Administry never sees your banking password)
3. Plaid establishes a read-only data feed
4. Transactions begin flowing into Administry within 24–48 hours

Supported banks: Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, US Bank, Citibank, Capital One, and most major regional and community banks. Credit unions are supported on a case-by-case basis.

No Plaid connection? If your bank doesn't support Plaid or you prefer not to connect directly, you can upload bank statements (PDF or CSV) manually. We'll process them within 1–2 business days.

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The Categorization Process

Once transactions are flowing in, Administry categorizes them using a combination of:

1. Rules-Based Matching

We build rules based on transaction merchant names, descriptions, and amounts. Common patterns are recognized immediately:

• Transactions from "Amazon Web Services" → Software & Subscriptions
• Transactions from "USPS" → Postage & Shipping
• Transactions from "Shell Oil" → Fuel & Transportation
• Recurring transactions for the same amount from the same payee → automatically categorized as the established category

2. Machine Learning Assistance

For transactions that don't match existing rules, our system uses learned patterns from similar businesses in the same industry to suggest a category. These suggestions are reviewed before being applied.

3. Human Review for Ambiguous Transactions

Some transactions genuinely require judgment:

• "Costco" — is this office supplies, meals, or equipment?
• Cash ATM withdrawals — what were these for?
• Large one-time payments to an unfamiliar vendor

Ambiguous transactions are flagged for your review in your Administry dashboard. You see the transaction, the description, and the suggested category — you confirm or correct it with one click.

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Your Review Dashboard

Each month, you'll receive a notification when your monthly transaction review is ready. This is typically a short session — most months, 80–90% of transactions are auto-categorized with high confidence.

Your review queue shows only:

• Transactions we weren't confident about
• Transactions above a configurable dollar threshold
• New merchants that don't match existing rules (first occurrence only — after you categorize it once, we remember)

Average review time: 5–10 minutes per month for most small businesses.

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What Gets Delivered

At the end of each month, your Administry account contains:

• Profit & Loss statement — income minus expenses, categorized by account
• Balance sheet — snapshot of assets, liabilities, and equity
• Transaction register — every transaction, categorized, with notes
• Expense breakdown — where your money went, by category

These reports are ready to share with your accountant or tax preparer. They're formatted to be compatible with QuickBooks export if your CPA uses that system.

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What Administry Doesn't Do (and Why)

We categorize and organize your books — we don't provide:

• Tax advice or tax filing: Your categorized books are input for your CPA or tax preparer. We make their job faster and cheaper by delivering clean data.
• Payroll processing: If you have W-2 employees, you'll need a separate payroll service (Gusto, ADP, etc.). We can import payroll journal entries.
• Accounts receivable management beyond invoicing: We track invoices and payments, but we're not a debt collection service.

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Connecting Multiple Accounts

Most businesses have more than one financial account:

• Primary business checking
• A business savings or reserve account
• A business credit card (or two)

Administry connects to all of them. Transactions are matched and de-duplicated so you don't see bank transfers between your own accounts as income and expenses — just real business activity.

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Getting Started

During your Administry onboarding, the bank connection step takes about 5 minutes. Once connected, your first month's transactions are categorized and ready within 48 hours.

See Connecting Your Bank for the step-by-step connection guide.