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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 open Edit merchant, where you can rename it and see its aliases. Renaming 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).

Aliases​

When you rename or merge a merchant, the old name becomes an alias of that merchant. New transactions with that name go to the merchant instead of creating a new one.

The merchant filter on Transactions, the payee picker and the Merchants search also match aliases. A result found by its alias shows it on a second line, for example Alias: AMZN Mktp US.

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.