Categorise your expenses

When you upload a bank statement, thola tags each transaction with a category — Salaries, Rent, COGS, Marketing, Software, Travel, etc. The rows it's not 100% sure about land in a triage queue. This recipe is the five-minute daily habit that keeps it clean.

The scene

It's Monday morning. The triage queue has 14 transactions waiting. Each one needs a category. If you let this pile up to month-end, you spend Sunday evening clicking through 200 of them in one sitting and you mis-tag half because you're tired.

Five minutes a day, instead, keeps it at zero.

The steps

1. Open the triage queue

Finance → Expenses → Triage queue, or from Home, tap the "Triage N transactions" chip.

You'll see something like:

2. Click through each

For each row:

• Confirm if thola's guess looks right
• Change if it's wrong — pick from the dropdown
• Split if a single transaction needs multiple categories (rare; e.g. ₹50K UPI that's 30K for software + 20K for travel)

Most rows are obvious. You'll average 2 seconds per row.

3. Add a note if it's unusual

For anything that might look weird later (one-off legal fee, advance to an employee, refund received), add a note:

"Q4 legal review for fundraising — one-time"

Notes are searchable and the Finance agent will reference them when explaining anomalies. The ₹2L legal fee won't look like a runway problem when the Founder agent reports next month.

4. Done — close

When the queue is empty, the Process score for Finance discipline ticks up by a hair. The Finance score reflects clean data; the Founder agent's briefings get more specific.

The gotchas

Don't make a category for every vendor

Stick to the ~10 standard categories (Salaries, Rent, COGS, Marketing, Software, Travel, Professional fees, Utilities, Statutory, Other). You can add custom categories if you really need to, but resist. Too many categories make trend analysis useless.

Sub-tagging is what notes are for.

Don't tag personal spend as business

The temptation is real, especially for founder UPI accounts where personal and business mix. The Finance agent doesn't know what's what until you tell it. If a row is personal, mark it Exclude from business. It gets parked in a separate ledger that doesn't feed the dashboards.

This matters for runway accuracy and for the eventual accountant who's going to review the books.

Auto-categorisation gets better over time

The first month, you'll change ~30% of thola's guesses. The third month, it's down to ~10%. The agent learns your specific vendor patterns. Stay with it — month one is the worst.

Bulk-categorise repeats

If you have 10 transactions to "Stripe" all in the same category, you don't have to click them individually. Select all → Confirm category. thola also learns this pattern; future "Stripe" rows auto-confirm.

A note on uploading more history

If you've only uploaded the last 3 months and want to import older data:

1. Get your bank statement export for the older period (CSV/PDF from your bank)
2. Drop it in the chat
3. Preview, confirm
4. The triage queue grows — you'll need to clear the older rows too

It's worth doing if you want trends to start from the right baseline. We've seen founders import 2 years of statements over a weekend, and the resulting Finance score is much more credible.

What's next

• Check your runway honestly — clean expense data makes the runway number trustworthy
• Chase overdue invoices — the other half of cashflow
• Run a monthly close — when this recipe scales up to full month-end