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See pricingGUIDE · QUICKBOOKS BANK RULES
A QuickBooks Online bank rule looks at money in or money out on chosen accounts, checks up to 5 conditions on the description, bank text or amount, and assigns a category, payee and tags. Rules run top to bottom, one per transaction, and auto-post skips your review. ZeraBooks AI bookkeeping categorizes from your reviewed history instead.
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WHAT A RULE CAN DO
Every rule has the same parts. These come from Intuit’s bank rules article, updated September 11, 2026, and checked October 22, 2026.
| Part | Choices | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| Direction | Money in or Money out | A rule never covers both. Two directions means two rules. |
| Accounts | One bank or card account, or All bank accounts | Narrow it when the same merchant means different things on different cards. |
| Conditions | Description, Bank text or Amount; Contains, Doesn’t contain or Is exactly | Up to 5 conditions a rule. |
| What it sets | Transaction type, Category, Payee, Tags | Intuit’s video also shows splitting one line by percentage or amount. |
| Auto-post | “Automatically confirm transactions this rule applies to” | Posts matches with no review. They show an AUTO badge. |
| Order | The list order on the Rules page | The highest rule that matches wins. Drag to reorder. |
| Limit | Up to 2,000 rules | Copy, disable or delete a rule from the Actions menu. |
Description is the cleaned-up name QuickBooks shows; Bank text is what the bank actually sent. A rule written against one won’t match the other, which is the most common reason a rule “does nothing”. Turn on Show full bank description in the Bank transactions settings to see the full bank text.
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STEP BY STEP
These are Intuit’s current menu names. You can also start from a line in For review with its Create a rule link, which fills in some of the fields for you.
Go to All apps, then Accounting, then Rules, and select New rule.
Type a name you will recognize in a list of fifty, such as “Rent: Meridian”. Choose Money in or Money out, and the account or All bank accounts.
Choose Description or Bank text, then Contains, Doesn’t contain or Is exactly, and the words or amount. Use + Add a condition for more, up to 5.
Pick the transaction type, category and payee, and any tags. For a credit card payment, set the type to Transfer and the card as the account, not an expense category.
Save without ticking “Automatically confirm transactions this rule applies to”. Watch the rule suggest categories in For review for a month before you let it post on its own.
On the Rules page, drag the new rule above any broader rule that could catch the same lines. Specific rules go on top.
WORKED EXAMPLE
Copperline Roasters is a fictional coffee roaster with six rules, in this order: 1 Rent (auto-post), 2 anything containing AMAZON to Office supplies, 3 AMAZON WEB SERVICES to Software and hosting, 4 ROYAL BEANS to Cost of goods sold, 5 COMCAST with an amount of exactly 89.99 to Utilities, 6 PAYMENT THANK YOU as a transfer to the Visa card. Here is September:
| Bank line | Amount | Rule that fired | Where it went | Right? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MERIDIAN PROPERTIES RENT | 3,200.00 | 1 | Rent, posted automatically | Yes |
| ROYAL BEANS IMPORT | 4,860.00 | 4 | Cost of goods sold | Yes |
| AMAZON MKTPLACE PMTS | 146.25 | 2 | Office supplies | Yes |
| AMAZON WEB SERVICES | 212.40 | 2, because it sits above 3 | Office supplies | No: Software and hosting |
| COMCAST BUSINESS | 94.99 | None: the price went up 5.00 | Left in For review | Missed |
| PAYMENT THANK YOU | 1,500.00 | 6 | Transfer to Visa | Yes |
| AMAZON MKTPLACE PMTS | 61.80 | 2 | Office supplies | Yes |
| Seven lines | 10,075.44 | 5 right, 1 wrong, 1 missed |
Office supplies shows 146.25 + 212.40 + 61.80 = 420.45 when it should be 208.05, and Software and hosting is short the same 212.40. Profit is unchanged, so nothing looks broken. Two fixes: drag rule 3 above rule 2 (or add “Description doesn’t contain WEB SERVICES” to rule 2), and change rule 5 to match on COMCAST alone, since a monthly bill’s amount rarely stays fixed.
RULES AND AUTO-CATEGORIZE
QuickBooks Online also has an auto-categorize setting, called Familiar expenses in the Bank transactions settings. Intuit’s article (updated August 5, 2026) sets the order the two run in:
Money in, loans, owner’s draws, transfers and check payments are never auto-categorized. They wait for a rule or for you.
Any rule that matches categorizes the line, and auto-post rules post it.
Expenses from vendors you have categorized before are filed when QuickBooks is highly confident. New vendors are skipped.
Everything else stays in For review. Auto-categorized lines can be found under Categorized with the Auto-categorized filter, and Undo sends one back.
COMMON MISTAKES
The rule checks the cleaned-up Description while the words you typed only appear in the raw Bank text, or the other way round. Turn on Show full bank description and match on what is really there.
Only one rule applies to a line, and it is the highest one that matches. “Contains AMAZON” above “Contains AMAZON WEB SERVICES” means the second never fires.
Phone, internet and software prices move. Match on the payee and leave the amount out unless the amount is what tells two payments apart.
A warehouse club, an online marketplace or a gas station sells more than one kind of thing. An auto-posted rule files every visit the same way and the lines never pass through For review.
A rule that sends PAYMENT THANK YOU to an expense category counts the card bill twice: once when each charge posted and again when you paid it. Set the type to Transfer.
Rules act on new lines waiting in For review. Lines already posted keep their old category until you change them, which is where a guide to categorizing uncategorized transactions helps.
KEEPING RULES TIDY
Yes. On the Rules page, open the New rule dropdown, choose Export rules and save the Excel file. Sign in to the other company, open Rules, choose Import rules from the same dropdown, browse to the file and pick which rules to bring over. Accountants use this to start a new client with a tested set. Check the categories afterwards, because a rule that points at an account the new company doesn’t have needs editing.
Moving from QuickBooks Desktop changes rules too. Intuit says only the first 5 conditions of each Desktop rule carry over, Begins with and Ends with become Contains, and a rule with both money in and money out conditions becomes two rules. Review the list right after a migration.
Rules are also part of reconciliation automation, since auto-posted lines arrive already categorized. What QuickBooks does and doesn’t automate in the reconciliation itself is in our QuickBooks bank reconciliation automation guide.
WITH ZERABOOKS
ZeraBooks has no rule builder. It categorizes every statement line from your reviewed history, and it asks when it isn’t sure. After a couple of months of bookkeeping, ZeraBooks categorizes 99.6% of transactions correctly, tested on years of bookkeeping for several companies.
CORRECT ONCE
Change a line’s category and ZeraBooks offers to apply it to the other transactions from the same merchant in the same direction, across every account and month. It never touches lines someone set by hand, transfers, card payments or bill and invoice payments. The correction is remembered for future statements, so AMAZON WEB SERVICES stays in Software once you have said so, without a rule to rank.
Apply a correction to similar transactionsASKS INSTEAD OF GUESSING
When its best guess is below 60%, ZeraBooks asks in Needs you with one-tap answers. It never overwrites a category you chose, and everything it did is listed in Done by AI with Undo. You can also tell Ask Zera a rule in plain words, such as “Uber rides are business travel”, and it keeps it. Statements are uploaded as PDF or CSV; there is no bank feed. Coming from QuickBooks? See our QuickBooks alternative page.
How AI works in ZeraBooks
Up to 5, each on Description, Bank text or Amount, using Contains, Doesn’t contain or Is exactly. A company can have up to 2,000 rules, per Intuit’s article updated September 11, 2026.
It posts every matching line straight to the books with no review in For review. Intuit says auto-post rules run when you sign in, upload a file, or create or change an auto-post rule. Use it only for lines that never vary.
The one higher on the Rules page. QuickBooks applies one rule per transaction, highest priority first, so put specific rules above broad ones. Drag a rule to move it.
No. They act on lines waiting in For review. Transactions already posted keep their category, so fix those by hand or in a batch.
Rules do exactly what you told them. Auto-categorize files expenses from vendors you have categorized before when QuickBooks is highly confident. Rules run first; auto-categorize takes the remaining expenses and never touches money in, loans, owner’s draws, transfers or checks.
No. ZeraBooks categorizes from your reviewed history, applies a correction to similar lines when you approve it, and asks when it isn’t sure. Prefer a person to do it? Our bookkeeping services team keeps the books from $150 a month (USD).
FREE SETUP + CATCH-UP
ZeraBooks categorizes your uploaded statements from your own history and asks when it isn’t sure. 7-day trial, then $79 a month billed annually; see ZeraBooks pricing.