Clean descriptions: tidy up payee names

Bank descriptions arrive noisy. Clean descriptions turns them into names you can actually read, and remembers your choices for every statement after this one.

Here is the kind of change it makes:

POS PURCHASE 1234 TIM HORTONS #2231 TORONTO ON
Tim Hortons

What does cleanup change, and what does it never touch?

Only the Description column changes. The dialog says so at the top: Descriptions only — dates & amounts never change. Dates, debits, credits and balances are left exactly as read from your statement, so your totals cannot move.

Open the dialog with the Clean descriptions button in the review toolbar. Settings has a door to the same dialog under Edit cleanup rules, and that dialog is the only place these rules are edited.

Quick clean

The first tab is a single switch, Tidy, plus a live preview.

The preview table has two columns, ORIGINAL and CLEANED, side by side. You see the exact result on your own lines before you commit to anything. Flip the switch off and the preview reverts, so you can compare in a second.

A short panel beside the switch summarises what Tidy is doing to your descriptions.

Underneath sits LETTER CASE, with five choices:

• Title Case — smart — the default. It title-cases names while keeping things like VISA, GST and e-Transfer as printed.
• Title Case
• Keep original
• ALL CAPS
• Sentence case

Any line you would rather leave alone can be kept as printed — click its toggle in the preview and that row stays exactly as the bank wrote it. The button at the bottom tells you the scope before you commit: Apply to N rows.

Payees

The second tab groups similar descriptions together and lets you name the group once.

The header tells you how many payees were found across how many lines. Each group appears as a card with an editable name field. Type the name you want — the mockup's example is AMZN Mktp becoming Amazon — and every line in that group takes it.

That choice is remembered. The next statement carrying the same merchant arrives already named the way you set it, without you opening this tab again. One-off payees are tucked away by default; click Show all to see them.

If a conversion turns up merchants you have not named yet, the review screen shows a small prompt pointing you back here.

Your rules

The third tab is yours alone. Nothing here is pre-filled.

FIND & REPLACE is a two-column table, FIND and REPLACE WITH. Add a pair and it runs on every statement you convert. Leave the replacement blank and the matched text is simply removed.

ALWAYS REMOVE is a plain text box. Put one word or phrase per line and each is stripped from every description.

At the foot of the tab is Clean automatically after every conversion. Tick it and the review table opens already cleaned, so the dialog becomes something you only visit when you want to change a rule. The same switch is available in Settings.

Your profile is saved

Everything above forms one standing profile: the Tidy switch, your letter case, your payee names, your find and replace pairs and your always-remove list. It is saved when you click Apply and reused automatically.

Two things are worth knowing about how it behaves afterwards.

Hand-edits always win. If you typed a description yourself in the review screen, cleanup leaves it alone. Your wording is never overwritten by a later rule change.

A batch stays consistent. When you convert several statements in one run, the profile as it stands at the export step applies across all of them. Change a payee name partway through a batch and the statements you already approved pick up the new name too, so a combined file does not end up with two spellings of the same merchant. Read Batch processing for the rest of that flow.

To get back to editing individual lines, see The review screen. For what your tidied descriptions look like in each file type, see Exporting your data.