Merchants

Merchants represent the businesses and entities behind your transactions. Skwad automatically assigns merchants when transactions are imported.

Merchants vs payees

Your bank statement shows a payee — the raw description from your financial institution. This is often messy: AMZN MKTP US*2K4R31J20, SQ *COFFEE SHOP, or PAYPAL *SPOTIFY.

A merchant is Skwad's cleaned-up version: Amazon, Coffee Shop, Spotify.

Key difference: renaming a merchant or payee changes how transactions are grouped and displayed, but it does not change the original description from your bank. Those are preserved in the line item view.

Managing merchants

Navigate to the Merchants page from the menu to see all your merchants with transaction counts.

Renaming

Tap or click a merchant name to rename it. This updates the merchant label across all associated transactions. The original payee from your bank is never changed.

Merging

Select two or more merchants using the checkboxes, then tap Merge. You'll be asked to pick which merchant to keep — the others will be merged into it, reassigning all their transactions. This is useful when the same business appears under different names (e.g., Starbucks and Starbucks Coffee).

Unknown merchants

When Skwad can't determine the merchant from a payee description, it assigns "Unknown Merchant." These will be automatically retried over time, but we recommend manually renaming and assigning these merchants.

Similar to categories, Skwad will automatically learn from your manual updates.

Automatic cleanup

Merchants with zero transactions are automatically deleted. You don't need to manually remove merchants after merging or deleting transactions.