Accounts, Categories & Bank Rules
Learn How to Organize Your Business Finances in Big E-Z Books
This tutorial shows you how to set up accounts (like checking and credit cards), expense categories (like Office Supplies and Advertising), and revenue categories in Big E-Z Books+.
Plus, learn how bank rules and auto-learn save you hours by automatically categorizing your transactions.
Best bookkeeping software for non-accountants and small business owners.
Video Script:
Let’s talk about something that sounds intimidating but really isn’t — your chart of accounts, or, as we call it, your ACCOUNTS & Categories. It’s just a list of buckets you put money into.
In Big E-Z Books+, you have two main types:
Accounts are things like your bank accounts, credit cards, and loans — the places your money lives. These show up in ALL CAPS so they’re easy to spot. You can mark any account as a Financial Institution, which unlocks CSV importing, reconciliation, and transaction entry. You can also toggle which accounts appear on your dashboard’s Working Cash Estimate — so you see the numbers that matter most to you.
Categories are where your income and spending get sorted — things like Rent, Utilities, Advertising under Expenses, and Sales are under Revenue. You can even add subcategories — like breaking “Office Supplies” into Printer Paper and Ink. And if an expense is a direct cost of making your product, just check the COGS box (Cost of Goods Sold) — that feeds into your gross profit calculations automatically.
Now here’s where it gets really good: Bank Rules.
Go to the Bank Rules tab, and you can set up rules like: “Any transaction with ‘AMAZON’ in the description should automatically be categorized as Office Supplies.” Next time you import transactions or hit Run Rules, those transactions get categorized instantly. No clicking, no thinking.
And then there’s Auto-Learn. Every time you manually categorize a transaction, Big E-Z Books+ remembers the pattern. So if you categorize a payment to “Staples” as Office Supplies, the next time a Staples charge shows up, it’ll suggest that category automatically — with a little ✨ sparkle badge so you know it’s an auto-suggestion.
You can also use Find & Replace to bulk-update transaction descriptions across your entire ledger, and if you’re a super admin, you can Import Accounts from a spreadsheet to set everything up in one shot.
The bottom line? You set things up once, and the system does the heavy lifting from there. That’s bookkeeping that works for you, not against you.