When you create an expense record, part of the record includes a reference to one of your payment accounts, one of you job records and one of your categories. Categories can be blank. But not jobs and not accounts. If you do not specify a value, we will do that for you.
The important thing to remember here is that when you specify an account, a job, or category on your expense record, you do not need to “exact match” the name or the nickname or the account number. Fuzzy Matching means that we will return the best match according to our fuzzy logic… and if there is not best match, then we default.
Shoebox provides account records and job records “out of the box” to get you started. We also provide a set of categories that conform to and include standard Schedule C expense categories.
For jobs, we include the job “none”, which is a placeholder for expense records that are not related to the delivery of products or services to a customer or client. You will see “none” on the expense record where you do not add a value for job.
Ditto, for payment accounts… out-of-box values include “default,” which is self-explanatory. Other value are “trash”, “cash” and “payables” ( more about payables later…)
Fuzzy match examples: The category “Computer and Software” can simply be matched with “Software”. The account “Chase Manhattan” can simply be matched by “Chase”. This works as long as you don’t have other accounts where you have included the word “Chase”, as in, for instance, the account you named “My Chase Account.” It’s up to you to know your data.
