Tidy Orders

Understanding categories

How Tidy Orders classifies your purchases

Every purchase that enters Tidy Orders — from your bank, a forwarded receipt, an Amazon order, or an upload — goes through the same three-step classification pipeline. Here's what happens, in order, and why some transactions wait for you in the review queue.

Categories 5 min read Updated September 27, 2026

The three-step pipeline

1. Vendor memory If you've classified this vendor before, the same category is applied automatically.
2. Your rules Rules you've set ("anything from Adobe → software") are applied next.
3. AI classification For everything else, AI proposes a category and subcategory with a confidence score.

The order matters: your own history always wins over a guess. The AI only sees purchases it hasn't learned from you yet.

What the confidence score means

When AI classifies a purchase, it attaches a confidence score. High-confidence results are auto-approved and skip your queue entirely. Lower-confidence ones land in the Review Queue with the proposed category pre-filled — you confirm or correct with one click.

You'll see the confidence shown as a small meter next to the category on transactions that weren't certain. No meter means the category came from your own vendor memory or rules — it's already yours.

Your corrections teach the system

Every time you change a category, that decision is saved to your vendor memory. The next purchase from the same vendor — whether it arrives by bank sync, email, or upload — inherits your correction. Reviewing the queue isn't just cleanup; it's training. Most users find the queue shrinks noticeably after the first few weeks.

The categories themselves

Tidy Orders organizes purchases into three top-level categories that mirror how Schedule C works:

  • Inventory / COGS — the cost of the products you sell. Read the guide.
  • Operating expenses — the everyday costs of running the business. Read the guide.
  • Assets / Depreciation — long-lived equipment and property. Read the guide.

Each maps onto specific Schedule C lines, so your year-end report rolls up line by line. For the special cases — meals at 50%, travel, entertainment — see Meals, travel, and the tricky deductions.

What the AI sees

Classification runs on transaction details — vendor, amount, description — not on your personal information. Identifying details are removed before anything is sent for AI processing, per our privacy policy.