One of Ambrook’s most powerful features to make the best use of your time is the ability to automate your bookkeeping. Every time you tag a transaction in the ledger, you have the option to automate the tags when you expect to see similar descriptions for transactions on your ledger.
How to create an automation
Creating an automation is easy in a few clicks:
Click the three dots next to the 'Tag' button and select 'Create Automation'.
Select the tags you want to associate with the transactions and hit “Tag.”
This will bring up a “Create Automation” box. Automations are triggered based on the words or characters in the Description field, so you can edit or entirely change the Description to have the automation run on all transactions whose Descriptions match (or contain) the text you enter here. Tip: You may need to delete trailing numbers or characters to set up automations for certain transactions, such as credit card payments. However, be careful of instances where you have a shorter word that might appear in multiple different types of transactions - for example "Apple" alone might be a payment to the Apple store, but it might also appear in "Johnny Appleseed" for your seeds.
Use the “Preview Tags” button to verify that you’ve correctly created the automation. It will also tell you how many transactions you’ll tag with the automation.
Tag all the transactions in your automation by clicking “Tag Transactions”. This will backfill transactions with the same description and will automatically tag any new transactions that come on to your ledger.
If you forget to select the checkbox, it’s not too late. Every time you complete a tagging action and return to the Ledger, a message will appear at the bottom of your screen confirming that the transaction was tagged and giving you the option to create an automation.
Click the Automate option and the same Create Automation pane will open as described above.
Consider creating an automation anytime you tag a transaction that is recurring and has a predictable description. Common examples of automatable transactions are fuel purchases, rental payments, credit card payments, and sales of uniformly named products.