Categories, rules and goals

Categories

Each category belongs to an expense or income group. Create, rename, or reorganize your categories and groups from the Categories page so they match your actual spending — the default categories are only a starting point.

Rules

The Rules page is under More in the sidebar (on a phone, in the More sheet) and in the command palette (⌘K). Rules automate categorizing and cleaning up your imported transactions. Each rule follows an If / Then structure:

• If — one or more conditions on the imported name, payee, category, note, or amount (operators: is, is not, contains, does not contain, starts with, one of, regex), combined as “all” or “any”.
• Then — the values to apply (payee, category, note…).

Rules run in three stages: Before, Normal, After — useful for chaining several rules in a precise order (e.g. normalizing a payee before categorizing based on it).

When you create or edit a rule, Arca offers to apply it to existing matching transactions, or to future ones only.

A rename that teaches itself

When you rename a transaction’s payee and the old name is no longer used by any other — say “La mie câline” becomes “Boulangerie” — a banner appears above the register and lets you choose, without interrupting anything: Merge and learn, Merge only, or Keep. Merging joins the two payees into one without losing any history; learning also creates a “Before” rule for each label your bank writes on those lines, so the next imported statement lands straight on the new name. The banner counts the labels involved before you click, and a single ⌘Z (Ctrl+Z on Windows and Linux) undoes the merge and the rules together. Applying a rule from the editor never triggers this prompt.

Goals

A savings goal (Goals page) tracks your progress toward a specific target — a vacation, an emergency fund, a future purchase. It follows the balance of an account or an envelope, with an optional target date; Arca then works out how much to save each month to hit it in time. It measures and moves nothing: see Savings goals.

An envelope target is set directly on a category (Budget page), in several forms:

• Monthly — fund a fixed amount every month,
• By date — reach an amount by a deadline, picked to the day in a native date field; Arca immediately shows the estimate “≈ {amount}/month until the deadline”,
• Refill — top a cap back up after each spend,
• Weekly — target calculated on a weekly basis,
• Limit — never go over an amount.

The category then shows its progress (“Target met”, “{amount} left to fund”) right in the budget table.

A reminder of last year’s large expense

When you open the target of an envelope that doesn’t have one yet, Arca can remind you of a large expense from the past year. The editor then opens on By date and shows, under the amount, “By date: {amount} for {month}” then “You paid {amount} in {month}.”. Use fills in the amount and the deadline (the end of the same month, next year); ignored, the suggestion leaves nothing behind.

It only appears when the envelope has at least twelve closed months of history, and one of those months — the most recent if there are several — was an outflow of at least 2.5 times its monthly average over those twelve months. Nothing is suggested for the current month. The suggestion learns from your entries: it disappears if you turn off Suggest from my entries (Settings, “Data & privacy” section).