Learn - Matching Transactions and Resolving Events

How bank and uploaded transactions connect to planned events.

Matching Transactions and Resolving Events

Your plan and your bank account need to stay in sync. The app does this with two operations: matching a payment, deposit, or transfer to the planned event it represents, and resolving the event so it leaves the planner and lands in History with your balance updated.

This page covers both, plus the in-between Paid state, how transactions move your account balance, the AI and non-AI ways to run a bulk match, and how to undo a resolve or delete from the History tab.

Most actions on this page are reversible. Resolving creates a History row with an Undo button. Deleting an event creates one too. The only action that is not reversible is permanently deleting a row from History itself.

The three states of an event

Every row in the planner is in one of three states.

Scheduled. The event is on the planner waiting for its date. Your account balance is unchanged.

Paid. You have paid the bill in real life (autopay went out, you swiped a card, you wrote a check), but the transaction has not appeared in your bank transactions yet. The paid-toggle button reads Mark Event as Paid when the event is Scheduled and flags the event with a checkmark on the Planner, so you do not pay the same bill twice. Once the event is Paid, the same button reads Mark Event as Unpaid. Your balance does not move.

Resolved. The event is done. It has been moved off the planner and into the History tab, with your account balance updated. To reverse a Resolve, open the History tab and use Undo.

The paid button is a toggle. It reads Mark Event as Paid on a Scheduled event and Mark Event as Unpaid on a Paid event. Switching off the Paid checkmark does not create a History row, because it does not change your historical record; only resolves and deletes do.

Why a separate Paid state? Paid is a reminder, not a balance change. Use it after you have sent a payment but before the matching bank transaction appears. It keeps the event on the Planner with a checkmark so you know not to pay it again. When the transaction appears, match it or resolve the event from the Planner. Until then, the app does not change the balance.

Who can use Match Transactions

The toolbar’s Match Transactions button has two visibility rules, depending on whether your budget is linked to a bank.

On a budget with no bank link. Owners always see the button. Editors see it too if they are on Premium. A free-plan editor sees the button grayed out and labeled Requires premium or owner access: they can read the planner and add transactions one at a time, but matching many transactions at once needs Premium or owner access.

On a Plaid-linked budget. Owners always see the button. Anyone who is not on Premium does not see the button at all. Plaid-linked budgets are not designed to take file uploads, and bank pulls are a Premium feature, so the match path is hidden for non-Premium users on those budgets.

If you are the budget’s owner, the Match Transactions button is enabled regardless of plan. If you are an editor and do not see the Match Transactions button on a particular budget, ask the budget’s owner to run matching for you. See Sharing a Budget for more on roles.

The three paths from Scheduled to Resolved

There are three ways an event becomes Resolved.

Path	What triggers it	What happens to your balance
Bank or file match, Transaction Tracking off	You confirm a matching payment, deposit, or transfer in the Match Transactions dialog	Resolves the event and moves by the matched amount
Transaction Tracking total reaches the planned amount	Transactions on the event reach or pass the planned amount	Already moved at each transaction; no extra move at resolve
Manual resolve	You tap Resolve Event, or set Status to Resolved in the Edit Item Event dialog	Moves by the planned amount when the event has no transactions

For items with Transaction Tracking on (groceries, gas, dining), each transaction moves your balance the moment it is recorded and counts toward the event’s running total. The event resolves on its own once the total reaches the planned amount, with no further action from you.

Why does balance move at the transaction, not at resolve? The purchase, charge, or deposit already happened. The app mirrors that immediately, without waiting for the budget period to end.

For cash payments, transfers between people, or anything else that has no bank transaction to match, select the event and tap Resolve Event. If the event’s item has Transaction Tracking on and no transactions yet, the No Transactions Recorded dialog asks first: Add Transaction to record what you actually spent, or Resolve Anyway to resolve at the planned amount. The same manual-resolve outcome is available from the Edit Item Event dialog: change the Status field to Resolved and save. The Status dropdown there reads Scheduled, Paid/Spent, and Resolved.

Mark Event as Paid / Mark Event as Unpaid is not a path to Resolved. It is a checkmark on the way to one of the three paths above.

The Match Transactions dialog

The dialog opens when the planner toolbar’s Match Transactions button is tapped, after a bank pull runs, or after a transaction file is uploaded. This is where you match many transactions at once.

The dialog runs in one of two modes. A segment at the top switches between them when both are available.

Auto-Resolve Events. The matching mode. The app matches new transactions with open events and brings up a review screen so you confirm what to save.
Compare Budget. A separate analysis that compares your actual spending against your plan. It does not produce matches; see Comparing your spending below.

Choosing how the matching runs

Inside Auto-Resolve Events, an AI Mode toggle controls whether the app calls a Premium AI to do the matching for you, or generates a prompt you take to the AI of your choice.

Integrated AI (Premium). The app sends your unmatched transactions and your relevant planner items to Google Gemini, gets the suggested matches back, and opens the review screen. The privacy hint reads “Your data is never sold or used for AI training.” See How AI works in this app on the Subscription page for what is and is not sent.
Bring Your Own AI (Free). The app generates a prompt and shows it on a Prompt step inside the dialog. You paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or whatever AI tool you already trust, paste the response into the Paste step, and the app routes the matches to the same review screen. The privacy hint reads “You are responsible for reviewing your AI provider’s privacy policy.”

The toggle defaults to Integrated AI for Premium subscribers and to Bring Your Own AI for everyone else. You can flip it any time. If a free-plan user toggles to Integrated AI, the dialog shows an upgrade card; matching stays blocked until they subscribe or flip the toggle back.

Uploading transactions

If your budget is not linked to a bank, the input step is a drop area for transaction files. Drag a file in, or tap the area to choose one. The accepted formats are CSV, TSV, and TXT, up to 3 files at once, 200 KB per file. With Integrated AI on, the combined size of all files is capped at 600 KB.

For each uploaded file, pick which of your accounts the transactions belong to using the dropdown next to the filename. Then tap Next to generate matches.

If the budget is linked to a bank, the input step shows a list of your linked accounts instead of the file picker. Tap Connect Bank to pull the most recent transactions from Plaid and feed them through the same matching flow. See Bank Linking for the connection setup.

Reviewing the matches

After the app has found possible matches, an inner review screen titled Review Transaction Matches opens.

The screen groups matches by account. For each account, you see:

The Current Balance, and once you have selected at least one match, a Projected Balance preview that reflects the change.
A list of suggested matches grouped by item where applicable, plus account-level All and None buttons to toggle every match in the account at once.
For items with Transaction Tracking on, a progress bar shows how the selected transactions compare to the budgeted amount. A green Will Resolve tag appears next to the progress bar when the selection brings the running total to or past the planned amount.

Why this default? The review opens with nothing selected. The matching engine is good but not perfect: a $43 grocery transaction and a $43 transfer to a friend look identical to it. Starting with everything unchecked makes you confirm each row deliberately, instead of skimming a screen of pre-checked matches and missing a wrong one. Tap All at the top of the Match Summary card to select everything in one go after you have looked, or tap individual rows to save only what you trust.

When the selection is what you want, tap Resolve N Selected Matches at the bottom. The whole batch saves together. For events whose items have Transaction Tracking on, the selected transactions are saved inside the event. For events whose items have Transaction Tracking off, the selected payment, deposit, or transfer resolves the whole event. Account balances update, and every event whose running total now meets its planned amount resolves into History. The dialog stays open after a batch with the remaining matches still visible, so you can run a second pass without reopening it. The Match Summary text tracks the running total: “X of Y transactions resolved · Z events resolved · N selected.”

If something goes wrong (network blip, server error), the failed batch returns to the dialog and you can retry. Re-tapping Resolve with the same selection does not double-post: the app checks transaction hashes, so the same transaction cannot be inserted twice.

When nothing matches

The matcher shows one of three messages instead of opening the review screen when it cannot produce usable matches.

No Matches Found. The app could not match the uploaded or pulled transactions to your scheduled events. This is normal if the transactions do not correspond to budget items you have set up, or if they were resolved earlier.
No New Transactions. Every transaction has already been processed. The matcher filters out transactions whose hash is already on one of your items, so re-uploading the same CSV or re-pulling the same Plaid range produces zero new matches. A Match All Transactions button on the dialog lets you re-run on the previously processed ones (useful if you skipped some by mistake last time).
Hash Verification Failed. This appears only on the Bring Your Own AI path. The AI you used returned hash values that do not match the file you uploaded, usually because the AI tampered with or invented the hashes. Regenerate the prompt with your current file and ask the AI to copy the hash values exactly as shown.

If you expected a match and got none of these messages, check Helping the matcher get it right below.

How transactions move your account balance

A transaction moves your account balance the moment it is recorded, not when the event resolves. Transactions are stored without signs; the direction of the balance change is derived from the linked item’s category type:

An Income category increases the account balance.
An Expense category decreases it.
A Transfer category decreases the source account and increases the destination by the same amount.

Categorizing items correctly is what tells the app which way the money is moving. A paycheck under an Expense category by mistake will move your balance the wrong way, even if everything else is set up correctly. (See Categories for category type setup.)

The exception is the manual-resolve path. With no transactions on the event, the resolve itself moves your balance by the planned amount, with the same sign rule.

Why should you trust the bank’s number over the app’s? The app keeps its own copy of each account balance by starting from the Current Balance, then applying saved transactions and resolved events. That copy is usually right, but if it ever disagrees with what your bank shows, the bank wins. Edit the Current Balance in the account directly to match. (See Accounts.)

Helping the matcher get it right

Two settings on each item improve match accuracy.

Bank Transaction Merchant Name. Write the merchant string as it appears on your bank statement (for example, WHOLE FOODS MARKET for a Groceries item, SPOTIFY for a Streaming item). The matcher leans on this when the item’s name and the bank description do not look alike. Editable on every plan; on Plaid-linked accounts the app populates it for you and shows it as read-only text.
Transaction Tracking on the item. With tracking on, every matched transaction is recorded inside the event and the event resolves when the total reaches the planned amount. With tracking off, one matched payment, deposit, or transfer resolves the event as a whole.

See Items for both fields in context. If a recurring transaction keeps matching the wrong item, splitting one item into two with different merchant names is usually the easiest fix.

Comparing your spending

The Match Transactions dialog has a second mode, Compare Budget, that does not produce matches. It runs a separate analysis comparing your actual spending across recent transactions against your planned budget items, and presents the result as a categorical breakdown. Use it when you want a quick read on “where am I over and under this month” without committing any matches.

Compare Budget has the same Bring Your Own AI alternative as the matching path, so it is available on the free plan via the prompt-and-paste flow.

Undoing a resolve or delete

Open the History tab to find resolves and deletes. Select a row and tap Undo Action in the toolbar. The Undo confirmation dialog opens.

The dialog does two things: it tells you what is being restored (the event returns to the planner), and it tells you what happens to your account balance. The balance side has three forms.

When the resolved event had no transactions

You see a Reverse Balance Change toggle, defaulting on. The resolve was the moment your balance moved (by the planned amount), so undoing should usually put it back. Confirm with the toggle on to reverse the balance change as part of the undo. Switch the toggle off if you have already corrected the balance some other way and do not want a second adjustment.

When the resolved event had transactions

You see no toggle, only a note explaining that your balance will not change. The transactions on the event moved your balance when they were recorded. Undo restores those transactions as active, so their effect on the balance stays in place. There is nothing extra to reverse.

When you are undoing a delete

You see no toggle, only a note that the balance will not change. Deleting an event never moved your balance, so undo has nothing to reverse.

In all three cases, the event returns to the planner with whatever transactions and customizations it had at the time it left.

When Undo is blocked

In a small set of cases the Undo button does not appear at all. The History row shows a Cannot undo message with the reason instead.

Reason shown	What happened
The parent item no longer exists.	The item that produced this event was deleted.
Original account no longer exists.	The account this event was against was deleted.
Original category no longer exists.	The category this event used was deleted.
The schedule for this event has been deleted.	The schedule on the item was removed.
The schedule’s timing has been modified since this event was resolved (or deleted).	The schedule’s frequency, day, or starting date was changed; the original timing is no longer in place.
This event was created before undo support was introduced.	A small number of very old History rows are not undoable.

The History row stays visible in all of these cases. The data is still there; it just cannot be reversed.

When undo is rejected after you confirm

One specific case is not pre-checked. If the deleted event had bank transactions on it, and one of those transactions has since been re-matched to a different event, undo is rejected when you confirm with the message:

Cannot undo: Bank transactions have been matched to other events. Please remove those matches before undoing this deletion.

The fix is the same every time. Open the other event that has the conflicting transaction, remove the transaction from it, then go back to History and try Undo again. The block exists so a single bank transaction cannot sit under two events at once.

What changes if Premium ends

If your Premium subscription ends while you have a matching workflow set up, the Match Transactions button stays available in two cases and disappears in one. On a non-Plaid budget you own, you keep the file-upload path and the Bring Your Own AI alternative; Integrated AI hides until you resubscribe. On a Plaid-linked budget where you are not the owner, the Match Transactions button disappears, because the bank link is no longer maintained on a free plan. Already-matched transactions, resolved events, and History rows are not affected.

See Subscription for the full list of what changes when Premium ends, and Your Account for where to cancel.

Quick reference

If you want to…	Do this
Flag a paid bill while you wait for the bank	Tap Mark Event as Paid. Balance is unchanged; select the Paid event and tap Mark Event as Unpaid to clear.
Resolve an event without a bank transaction	Select the event, tap Resolve Event. Balance moves by the planned amount.
Match many bank or file transactions at once	Tap Match Transactions in the planner toolbar.
Match without a Premium AI	Flip the AI Mode toggle to Bring Your Own AI and use the prompt-and-paste flow.
Reduce wrong matches on a recurring item	Fill in Bank Transaction Merchant Name on the item. (See Items.)
Undo a resolve or delete	Open the History tab, select the row, tap Undo Action, confirm the dialog.
Restore a deleted event whose transactions were re-matched elsewhere	Open the other event, remove the conflicting transaction, then retry Undo.

Behind the scenes

The matcher reads the unmatched transactions on each account plus the planner items that fall near those transaction dates, then asks the AI (Gemini on Integrated AI, whichever AI you paste into on Bring Your Own AI) to suggest matches.

Date window per item frequency. The matcher only sends events that fall near the transaction date range, with a buffer that depends on the schedule:

Schedule	Buffer added on each side of the date range
Daily	2 days
Weekly	4 days
Bi-weekly	7 days
Monthly	10 days
Quarterly	15 days
Annually	30 days

Up to 40 events go into the prompt for each account. For items with Transaction Tracking on, the matcher includes up to 3 occurrences so the AI can see the recurrence pattern.

Duplicate detection. Every transaction is hashed at parse time. Before the AI is called, the app filters out any transaction whose hash already exists on one of your items. Re-uploading the same CSV or re-pulling the same Plaid range produces zero new matches; the app shows the No New Transactions message instead. The same hash check also runs when matches are saved.

What the AI sees, and does not see. The matcher sends the unmatched transactions on the file or Plaid pull, plus the relevant planner items (name, amount, due date, frequency, period, the optional Bank Transaction Merchant Name, and whether Transaction Tracking is on). It does not send your account balances, your account numbers, your bank login, your other budgets, or transactions on accounts you did not include in this match. See How AI works in this app for the cross-cutting privacy framing.

When you save a batch of matches, the resolves and the new transactions sync to every collaborator on the budget in real time. (See Sharing a Budget.)

Planner for the Grid and Calendar views, the toolbar, and editing an event versus editing the item.
Items for the Transaction Tracking toggle and the Bank Transaction Merchant Name field.
Transactions for adding, editing, and deleting transactions inside an event.
History and Undo for the History tab in detail and the full Undo dialog.
Bank Linking for connecting an account so you can pull bank transactions with Match Transactions.
File Uploads for supported formats and how the parser handles odd column orders.
Subscription for what each plan includes, how AI features work, and what changes when Premium ends.
Your Account for cancelling Premium or backing up a budget before you do.