Merchant Names
Bank descriptions are not written for people to read:
SQ *BLUE BOTTLE 0231 OAKLAND CA
POS DEBIT 4829 TRADER JOE S #178 SEATTLE WA
ACH DEBIT PYMT SUNRISE PROPERTY MGMT 0011492
When Aventurine recognizes the business in one of these, it shows you a clean name instead — “Trader Joe’s” — with a small arrow next to it. Click the arrow to reveal your bank’s original text underneath; click again to hide it. In the picture above, the middle row is a recognized merchant; the rows either side are not, so they show the bank’s text directly and get no arrow.
The original is never lost
The clean name is a display label. Your bank’s exact text is stored untouched, and everything that depends on it keeps using it: duplicate detection, learned category rules, searching, and exports.
If you search for “TRADER JOE S #178”, you will find the row even though it displays as “Trader Joe’s”. The Name filter searches both.
Only recognized merchants get one
A name comes from a curated dictionary. It is a lookup, never a guess: if the merchant is not in the list, no name is shown and the row displays your bank’s text directly, with no arrow.
This is why you cannot get a mangled name — the app will not invent one from the description by stripping characters. It can be absent, but it cannot be wrong.
Two consequences worth knowing:
Categorized does not mean named. A row can be filed under Food because the description contains “supermarket”, without getting a name — the app worked out the kind of business, not its identity. Only recognizing a specific merchant produces a name.
Named does not mean categorized. If one of your own rules set the category first, the name is still applied. The merchant’s identity is true regardless of who decided its category.
Rows that never get one
Transactions you type in yourself. You wrote the description, so there is nothing to clean up.
Transactions whose description you edit. Editing the description clears the clean name — your text replaces it, and the app does not overrule you.
Everything imported before the feature existed, in a database you have been using a while. Older rows keep showing their original text. Re-importing is not necessary and will not add names to existing rows.
Everything, when automatic categorization is switched off. The setting covers names as well. See Preferences.
Where you see them
The clean name appears in the Transactions ledger and in the “similar transactions” lists. The import preview shows your bank’s original text, since the names are applied when the rows are saved.
Related: Automatic Categorization · The Transactions Page · Duplicate Transactions