Vendor
A vendor is who a transaction was paid to or received from, identified from the transaction's own description rather than tracked as a separate chart-of-accounts entry.
In short
Who the money went to, not a category of spending. A vendor isn't given its own account — the memo and description already record who was paid, and spending_summary's vendor grouping normalizes similar descriptions so repeat charges from the same store collapse into one total.
Also called: merchant, payee
A vendor is simply who a transaction was paid to, or who it was received from — a hardware store, a software company, a client. Unlike an account, a vendor isn't a formal part of the chart of accounts; it's read directly from a transaction's description rather than assigned its own dedicated line in the ledger.
This is a deliberate design choice, not an oversight: creating a separate chart-of-accounts entry for every vendor would multiply the number of categories to choose between without adding anything most people would ever look at, since each transaction's memo and description already record who the money went to.
Vendor is one of the two ways spending_summary can group totals, alongside category. Grouping by vendor normalizes descriptions so store numbers and minor formatting differences collapse into one line — "Hardware Store #4471" and "HARDWARE STORE 4471" become one total, not two — which makes it a useful, category-independent way to see where money actually went, since it works off the description directly rather than requiring anything to have been categorized first.
Vendor normalization isn't perfect: an unusually formatted description may not merge with its counterparts and can show up as its own separate line, worth a second glance when a vendor total looks smaller than expected.
What people get wrong
- Creating a separate chart-of-accounts entry per vendor instead of relying on the memo and description — that's what spending_summary's vendor grouping is for.
- Assuming vendor normalization always merges every variant of a store's name — an unusually formatted description can still show up as its own separate line.
- Confusing vendor grouping (works from the description, regardless of categorization status) with category grouping (only sees transactions that have actually been categorized).
Common questions
- Should I create a separate account for a vendor I use a lot?
- Usually not — the memo and description already record who was paid, and spending_summary's vendor grouping gives you totals per vendor without adding an account for each one.
- Why didn't two charges from the same store merge into one vendor total?
- Vendor grouping normalizes similar descriptions, but an unusually formatted one may not merge with its counterparts and can show up as its own separate line.
Machine-readable: /api/knowledge/concept:vendor