Daily work
Vendors and rules
Vendor records, aliases, GL codes, auto-categorization rules and the 1099 report.
In short
Vendors answer who you paid. Rules answer where that spending files. Keeping them separate is what makes 1099 totals trustworthy.
Two different questions look similar and are worth keeping apart. Who did you pay is a vendor. Where does that spending belong is a rule. Mixing them is how 1099 totals end up wrong.
Vendor records
A vendor on the vendors page holds the identity: legal name, address, tax ID, whether you file a 1099 for them, and a default GL code.
Bank feeds and imports bring in whatever text the bank had, which is rarely the legal name. Linking a charge to a vendor keeps both: the record for reporting, and the original text for matching against future imports.
Aliases
The same supplier arrives spelled differently every month. An alias teaches the app that a particular spelling means a particular vendor, and it is offered as a checkbox when you link a charge whose text does not already match.
Matching is exact rather than fuzzy, once the text is normalized for case and spacing. That is a deliberate limit: a fuzzy match that guesses wrong silently misattributes someone's 1099 total, and you would have no reason to look.
Setting up from history
If you have been running a while before creating vendors, the vendors page offers to build them from what you already have. It groups the spellings it found, lets you rename and deselect, and then links past charges in one pass.
GL codes
A managed list of codes for your accountant. Each vendor can carry one as its default, and it shows on transaction tables as a read-only column.
Note
There is no per-charge GL code. The code comes from the vendor, so changing it in one place changes it everywhere, and the two can never disagree.
Rules
Rules run when spending arrives. A rule matches on vendor or description text and either ignores the charge or files it to a job and category automatically.
This is the lever that makes the inbox fast. A handful of rules for the suppliers you use weekly does most of the categorizing before you look at it. Rules can also be applied to the charges already sitting in the inbox.
Rules are re-checked against reality when they run, so a rule pointing at a category that has since been deleted degrades to assigning the job rather than filing the charge somewhere wrong.
The 1099 report
Calendar-year totals per vendor you have flagged for 1099, with the reporting threshold highlighted and any missing tax ID or W-9 called out while there is still time to chase it.
The report counts the parts of a split charge rather than the container, so a split invoice still totals correctly. See transactions and the inbox for splitting.