Transaction enrichment

Bank transaction text is often incomplete or messy: a card terminal ID, a truncated merchant name, a payment processor instead of the shop. Transaction enrichment uses AI to work out who you actually paid, and adds clean merchant names, logos, categories and more to your transactions.

What enrichment adds

• Counterparty name: a clean name for the merchant or person, for example the shop instead of the raw card text.

• Logo and website of the merchant.

• Category: what kind of spending or income it is.

• Subscription: whether the payment is a subscription.

• Location: the merchant's address, with Google Maps and Apple Maps links.

• Intermediary: a payment service that sits between you and the merchant, such as a payment processor, with its own name, website and logo.

• Merchant category codes and a certainty score for the match.

To see it, open a transaction and look at the Enriched Data section. What you get depends on the provider and on what it can recognise: Ntropy can fill in all of the above, while OpenAI (Azure) gives you a clean payee name only.

Who can use it

• Enrichment is part of the Pro plan's AI features. On Basic, the switch is locked and you'll see Upgrade to enable AI features. See synci.io/pricing.

• It works on bank accounts only. Brokerage and crypto accounts can't be enriched.

• It is switched on per account, and it is off until you turn it on.

Turning it on

For an account you already have

1. Open the account and go to its Settings tab, then the Enrichment section.

2. Switch on Enable Transaction Enrichment.

3. Synci shows what will happen to your existing transactions under Enrich recent transactions?. Click Enable enrichment.

4. Choose a Provider, and optionally a Country. Setting the country where your transactions are made significantly improves accuracy.

5. Click Save. Enrichment starts once your settings are saved.

When you connect a new bank

In the Preferences step of the setup, click Set up enrichment next to an account, choose your settings and click Apply. Then click Save and continue.

Choosing a provider

• Ntropy (the default): a specialised financial transaction enrichment engine, with the most complete data and best accuracy.

• OpenAI (Azure): the legacy Azure OpenAI solution for payee names. Choose it if you only need clean payee names, or if Ntropy isn't working well for you.

Which transactions are enriched

• Booked transactions only. Enrichment happens when your bank books a transaction, usually after 1 to 3 days. Pending transactions are not enriched; they are enriched once they book.

• The last 3 months. New transactions are enriched as they sync, as long as they are from the last 3 months. Older history from your first import is not enriched.

• Transactions you already have. When you switch enrichment on for an account, Synci also enriches booked transactions from the last 3 months, up to 1,000, and never from before you connected the account. This runs once: turning enrichment off and on again won't enrich the same transactions a second time. While it runs, the Enrichment section shows its progress.

A few things to expect:

• New transactions that are being enriched are sent to your destinations once enrichment is done, so your rules and destinations see the enriched values.

• When existing transactions are enriched, transactions you already transferred are updated in destinations where the linked account updates the payee or description when a transaction books.

• Each enriched transaction also sends a transactions.updated event to your webhooks. If a webhook drives a Zapier automation, each of those events uses a Zapier task.

New Zealand banks

Transactions from New Zealand banks arrive already enriched by Genie (Akahu), with clean payee names and categories. The provider is fixed and can't be changed, and enrichment can't be turned off for these accounts. As with other providers, you need the Pro plan to see the enriched data.

Using enriched data

• Payee names. With Automatic mapping, Synci uses the enriched counterparty name as the payee whenever there is one. To decide for yourself, open the account's Settings tab, go to Map fields, turn off Automatic mapping for the payee or description, and add AI-enriched counterparty name to the list of fields, in the order you want them tried.

• Rules. Enriched fields such as the counterparty name and category can be used in your rules.

• Google Sheets and Notion. Add the enriched counterparty, category and subscription fields as columns or properties. Notion's Synci Finance template uses them for its Merchant and Category properties.

• API. Add include=enriched when listing transactions to get the enriched data.

Your data

Transactions are only sent to a provider for accounts where you turned enrichment on. When a transaction is deleted from Synci, whether you delete it or your data retention setting removes it, its enriched data is deleted too, and if Ntropy enriched it, Synci asks Ntropy to delete its copy. When you delete your Synci account, Synci asks Ntropy to delete everything it holds for you.

FAQ

Why isn't this pending transaction enriched? Pending transactions often carry little more than an amount and a terminal code, and the bank sends better details once it books them. Synci enriches the transaction when it books.

Why are my older transactions not enriched? Enrichment covers the last 3 months, and when you switch it on later, it doesn't reach back before you connected the account.

I turned enrichment off and on again. Why did nothing happen? Existing transactions are only enriched once. New transactions keep being enriched as they sync.

Why can't I switch enrichment on? It needs the Pro plan, and it is only available for bank accounts.