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Equated finds your merchants for you. Every transaction, bill, invoice, and receipt is matched to a vendor or customer automatically — from the name on the record. You don’t tag anything. We get it right most of the time. When we don’t, the fix is a merge: fold entries that are really the same business into one.

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They build themselves

As records come in, Equated reads the raw description, resolves it to a real business, and creates a merchant for it. A messy SQ *BLUE BOTTLE COFFEE becomes Blue Bottle Coffee, and everything that matches links to it. It also infers the role from which way the money moved:
  • Money leaving your account → the merchant is a vendor
  • Money arriving → the merchant is a customer
A merchant can be both. The roles are sticky, so a one-off refund won’t flip a customer into a vendor.

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One merchant, linked everywhere

We match using the name on each record — but once matched, the link is to a stable merchant, not the text. So a bank transaction, the bill it pays, and the receipt for it all point at the same merchant. That shared identity is what makes the numbers work: a vendor’s bill and the payment applied to it land on the same merchant, so their balance nets to zero when paid. It’s also why merging duplicates updates every linked record at once, and why a changed bank descriptor doesn’t orphan your history.

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Vendors and customers are one directory

The Vendors and Customers pages are two views of this single directory, filtered by role. There’s no separate vendor list or customer list underneath — just merchants with role flags. Each merchant shows lifetime spend or revenue and a monthly trend, pulled straight from your posted ledger. Open one to see every transaction, bill, invoice, or payout attributed to it.

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When we get it wrong

Amazon and Amazon Web Services, or a vendor whose bank descriptor changed, can show up twice. Select the duplicates and merge them into the one you want to keep. Everything — transactions, bills, invoices, ledger history, and automation rules — moves onto the merchant you keep, and the others are retired.
Merging is permanent. There is no un-merge. Pick the merchant you want to keep before you confirm.
Roles take care of themselves: they follow the money, a merchant can hold both roles at once, and the sticky rule means a one-off refund never flips anyone. A merchant that looks mis-roled is usually two businesses sharing one record, which the merge fixes.

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Why it matters

Because merchants are automatic, “how much did we spend with this vendor?” and “what has this customer paid us?” are answerable on day one — without you tagging a single transaction.