Matching money to accounts

Money arrives in your organisation’s bank account carrying a reference. Nobody told you it was coming, and nobody told you whose it is.

This article is how that money finds the right customer account, and who does which part of the work.

What a matching rule is

A matching rule says one thing: a payment quoting this reference belongs to this account.

Each rule has two parts.

Part	What it means
Match Value	The text to look for in the reference the payer quoted
Match Type	Whether the reference must be that text exactly, or only contain it

Match Type has two settings, and the choice matters.

Match Type	Matches when
Equals	The reference is that text and nothing else
Contains	That text appears somewhere inside the reference

Choose Equals for a reference the payer copies exactly, such as an account number. Choose Contains where the payer’s bank wraps the reference in other words, so the reference you care about is buried in a sentence.

Rules sit on the account. Open the account, then Payments > Matching Rules. Each row is one rule, with its match type and its match value.

The rule every account starts with

An account that can receive money this way is given one rule the moment it becomes active. That rule is the account number, matched exactly.

Sam’s account number is 12345678, so Sam’s account starts with one rule:

Match Type	Match Value
Equals	12345678

That covers the ordinary case. A customer who quotes their account number is recognised without anybody setting anything up.

Not every account gets one. Whether a product’s accounts receive money this way at all is part of how your organisation configures that product. A product that is never paid into unannounced starts with no rule, and the tab stays empty.

Add your own rule

The usual reason is a customer who quotes something else every month — an invoice number, an order number, a scheme membership number.

Open the account.
Select Payments, then Matching Rules.
Select Add Rule.
Enter the Match Value.
Choose the Match Type.
Select Save.

Alex always pays quoting PAY-42 somewhere in a longer reference. So Alex’s account gets a second rule:

Match Type	Match Value
Equals	12345678
Contains	PAY-42

An account can hold as many rules as it needs. They do not compete — each one is another way the same account can be recognised.

Change or remove a rule

Select the pencil on a row to change its match value or match type. Select the bin to delete it.

Deleting is not reversible, and the panel says so before it does it. Delete a rule only when the reference is genuinely dead, not merely quiet.

What happens when the account closes

A closed account should stop attracting money, so its rules retire with it. Two closures are deliberate exceptions.

How the account closed	What happens to its rules
Ordinary closure	The rules are retired with the account
Early settlement	The rules are kept
Bad debt write-off	The rules move to the salvage account

Early settlement keeps its rules because an early settlement can be undone. A bounced collection reopens the account, and nothing would put a retired rule back.

A write-off moves its rules because a debtor who keeps paying pays against the reference they have always used. That money should land on the salvage claim, not bounce around unidentified. See bad debt write-off and recoveries and credit refunds.

How a statement is worked today

Be clear about this part, because the two halves live in different places.

When a bank statement is imported, the system reads every line and proposes what each one is. It matches a line against the payments it is already expecting — deposits already registered, cash already banked, collections already sent out.

It works down four tests in order, and stops at the first that fits.

Test	What it looks at
Exact reference	The reference on the line is exactly the reference expected
Payer name	The payer’s name on the line matches what is expected
Reference inside the narrative	The expected reference appears inside the line’s description
Amount and date	The amount matches, within a cent, inside the expected date window

Wherever text is compared, capitalisation does not matter.

A credit of 500.00 lands on 10 January 2026, quoting INV-001. A deposit expecting reference inv-001 is already outstanding, so the line is proposed against it.

A line whose description reads payment for ORDER-555 thanks is proposed against an item expecting ORDER-555. The reference is buried in the sentence, and the third test still finds it.

You then work the proposals on the bank account, on its Reconciliation tab.

Open the bank account.
Select Reconciliation, then Proposed.
Select Confirm on a proposal you agree with, or Reject on one you do not.

A confirmed proposal is what moves the money. Rejecting one puts the line back in front of you rather than throwing it away. If you want the system to look again — after registering a deposit it did not know about, for instance — open the statement and select Re-run matching.

The system also remembers what you confirmed. The next statement carrying the same payer or the same wording is proposed the same way, without waiting for you to decide again.

What is automatic today, and what a person does

Read this table before you rely on a rule.

Step	Who does it today
Import the statement	Automatic
Propose what each line is	Automatic, on import
Confirm or reject each proposal	A person
Register a deposit nobody expected	A person
Decide which customer account an unexpected deposit belongs to	A person
Post the money to that account	Automatic, once allocated

Your matching rules are not read by any of this. They are recorded, kept, carried to a salvage account on write-off, and retired on closure — but nothing allocates a deposit off them yet. Today a rule records who a reference belongs to; it does not save you the step.

This is worth setting up anyway. The rules are the answer to whose is this, they survive the person who knew it, and they are what automatic allocation reads when it is switched on. It is much cheaper to record the answer while the customer is on the phone than to reconstruct it a year later.

Where the money shows up

Once a deposit is allocated, it appears on the account’s Bank Deposits tab and on the transaction list as an ordinary credit. It counts from the date the money was paid, not the day somebody worked out whose it was.

See payments on an account, reading the transaction list and value dating.