Rename, Merge, and Track Your Merchants

Your bank knows where you spend money. It just doesn’t always say so clearly. A dinner at a local restaurant becomes “SQ LOCAL BISTRO 492BNYC.” An Amazon purchase becomes “AMZN MKTP US*1K9A8B20Q.” A coffee shop shows up as “TOAST COFFEE CO PORTLAND OR.”

The payee name — the most important piece of information for understanding your spending — is frequently garbled, abbreviated, and buried under reference codes. And messy merchant names aren’t just annoying. They break your automations, inflate your spending categories, and make your reports unreliable.

We built the Skwad merchant management page to solve this completely. Rename merchants to something readable, merge duplicates into one, and see exactly how much you’ve spent at each one — all from a dedicated management interface.

Why merchant names get messy

Most bank transaction systems were built decades ago for a world where transaction descriptions were printed on paper statements and didn’t need to be human-readable. The format they use is designed to uniquely identify the merchant and the transaction, not to tell you what you bought or where.

When a merchant processes a payment through Square, the payee includes “SQ *” followed by whatever name the business registered. That registration might not match what’s on the sign outside. When you shop on Amazon, you might see “AMZN MKTP,” “AMAZON.COM,” “AMZN PRIME,” or “AMAZON DIGITAL” depending on what specifically you purchased. These are technically different merchants in Amazon’s payment processing system, but to you, they’re all just Amazon.

Some payment processors append location codes, reference numbers, or timestamps. Others truncate long merchant names. A chain restaurant might appear differently at each location. Contactless payments through Apple Pay or Google Pay sometimes override the merchant name entirely.

The result is a transaction list where the same merchant appears under three different names, and completely different merchants appear similar. Budgeting on top of this noisy data requires constant manual correction — unless you have tools to fix it systematically.

The Skwad merchant management page

The merchant management page gives you a dedicated place to view and manage all the merchants Skwad has identified in your transaction history. Access it from the main navigation or through Settings.

Every merchant that has appeared in your transactions is listed here, along with the number of transactions associated with it. This count is itself useful — it shows you which merchants you actually visit frequently versus which ones appeared once and never again.

Renaming merchants

The rename function is the simplest and most immediately useful feature. Select any merchant and change its display name to whatever makes sense to you.

“SQ *LOCAL COFFEE” becomes “Local Coffee Shop.” “AMZN MKTP US” becomes “Amazon.” “WHOLEFDS MKT” becomes “Whole Foods.” These changes propagate across your transaction history — every transaction that was attributed to that merchant now shows the clean name.

Renamed merchants are your names. Skwad preserves your customization even as new transactions come in. If a new charge comes from “SQ *LOCAL COFFEE” in the future, Skwad will automatically associate it with your renamed “Local Coffee Shop” merchant.

The rename interface validates uniqueness as you type — if you try to rename a merchant to a name that already exists, Skwad will tell you before you save. This prevents accidentally creating a duplicate when you mean to merge (which has its own dedicated tool, described below).

Merging duplicate merchants

Renaming handles garbled names. Merging handles a more complex problem: the same real-world merchant appearing under multiple different names in your transaction data.

If you shop at Amazon regularly, you might have “AMZN MKTP US,” “AMAZON.COM,” and “AMAZON DIGITAL” as separate merchants in Skwad. They’re all Amazon, but your bank’s payment processing treats them differently.

The merge feature lets you select a set of merchants and combine them into one. You designate which merchant name to keep, and Skwad reassigns all transactions from the others to that primary merchant. The duplicates disappear; their transaction history lives on under the unified merchant.

This has downstream benefits throughout Skwad:

Budget categories consolidate under a single merchant, giving you an accurate picture of total spending
Automations can target a single merchant instead of multiple variations
Search becomes more reliable — searching for “Amazon” returns all Amazon transactions, not just those from one variant
Spending reports show total merchant spending rather than fragmented subtotals

Bulk actions with shift-click

For users with many merchants to clean up, the merchant table supports shift-click multi-select. Click one merchant, then shift-click another, and everything in between is selected. You can then apply bulk actions — like merging a set of duplicates — without selecting them individually.

This is particularly useful when you first set up merchant management and find that a handful of merchants have accumulated many naming variations over time. Select all the Amazon variants at once, merge, done. Move on to the next cleanup target.

Drilling into transaction counts

Every merchant in the table shows a transaction count. Click that count and Skwad filters your transaction list to show only transactions from that merchant.

This drill-down behavior turns merchant management into a powerful investigation tool. If you’re surprised by how many transactions are attributed to a particular merchant, click through to see the full list. You might discover that multiple different purchases were auto-merged into one merchant (easy to split), or that you genuinely did visit that coffee shop 47 times last year (maybe a wake-up call for your budget).

Transaction count drill-through is also useful for verifying a rename or merge operation worked correctly. After renaming a merchant, click the transaction count to confirm all the right transactions are associated with the new name.

How merchant management improves your automations

Skwad’s automation engine uses merchant names as one of its key condition types. When you create a rule that says “if merchant is Amazon, categorize as Shopping,” that rule is only as effective as the consistency of your merchant data.

Before merchant management, you might have needed separate automation rules for each Amazon naming variant. Merge all Amazon variants into one, and a single automation rule handles all of them.

Clean merchant names mean cleaner, simpler automation rules with fewer edge cases. Your rules become more reliable and easier to maintain.

How merchant management improves your spending reports

Skwad’s spending breakdown shows how much you’ve spent per merchant within a date range. With fragmented merchant data, that breakdown shows inflated lists of subtotals for merchants that are really the same place. After cleaning up merchants, the breakdown accurately reflects your actual spending patterns.

A user who shops at Target regularly might previously have seen Target, “TARGET *,” “TARGET.COM,” and “TARGET #1842” as separate entries in their spending breakdown. After merging, they see one “Target” entry with the accurate combined total. That total is far more useful for understanding how much of the monthly budget goes to Target.

Best practices for merchant cleanup

Start with high-frequency merchants: Merchants that appear dozens or hundreds of times in your transaction history have the most impact when cleaned up. Sort the merchant table by transaction count and start with the top entries.

Check for payment processor prefixes: Many confusing merchant names come from payment processor prefixes like “SQ *” (Square), “TST*” (Toast), “PP*” (PayPal), or “PYPL *” (also PayPal). Once you recognize these prefixes, you can quickly identify the underlying merchant and rename accordingly.

Merge before automating: If you’re setting up automation rules for specific merchants, clean up merchant names first. Creating a rule against a messy merchant name before merging means you might end up with orphaned rules after the merge. Clean first, automate second.

Review periodically: New merchants appear as you try new places. The shift-click bulk select makes it fast to sweep through new additions and clean up any variants that emerged over the past few months.

Use descriptive names: When renaming, choose names that match how you think of the merchant, not how the bank spells it. If you think of a place as “Whole Foods,” name it Whole Foods. Your transaction list should make sense to you.

An hour of work that pays dividends for years

Merchant management is foundational work — it’s not glamorous, but it makes everything else in Skwad work better. Clean merchant data means spending reports you can trust, automation rules that actually work, budget categories that accurately reflect where money is going, and a transaction list you can skim quickly without decoding abbreviations.

Most budgeting apps push this cleanup work onto you implicitly — you rename things manually, one transaction at a time. Skwad’s merchant management page lets you do it systematically, once, across your entire history.

Navigate to Merchants in the Skwad sidebar. You’ll see a list of all detected merchants sorted by transaction count by default. Start with the top entries — these are your highest-frequency merchants and the ones most worth cleaning up.

For each merchant that looks wrong: