How To Use Emma’s Smart Rules Feature

Smart Rules is a Emma Pro feature that lets you link your offline accounts with regular transactions. 

This new feature means your transactions and account balance from any offline account will be automatically updated, saving you time, and ensuring complete account accuracy. 

Smart Rules relies on you having offline accounts, so before we delve into how Smart Rules works lets first take a look at our offline account feature. 

What are Offline Accounts?

Offline accounts is an Emma Pro feature that lets you manually create any kind of account. This is particularly useful if you have an account that isn’t currently supported by Emma. 

For example, you might want to track how much money you have in a savings or investment account that isn’t available in Emma. You might also use offline accounts to track cash purchases or your mortgage. You could even use offline accounts to track accounts in countries that Emma doesn’t support. 

To create an offline account go to the Feed tab in Emma, select the + add button under your account balances, Offline Account then select the account type and complete the steps.

Before the introduction of our new Smart Rules feature you would then have to manually create transactions and update the balance on these accounts.

This is fine if you only have a couple of accounts to manually update every month. But, we understand that it can get quite time-consuming if you have offline accounts that need updating more frequently.

How Does Smart Rules Work? 

Smart Rules was therefore introduced to help save you time. With Smart Rules you’ll no longer need to manually update your balance and add transactions.. 

All you need to do is create a rule. Every time you make a transaction to an account not linked in Emma, the transfer will be automatically detected and will show on your offline account. This process basically mimics what would happen with a normal account supported by Emma. 

For example, say you have a savings account you’re tracking in Emma using the offline account feature.  Every time you transfer £20 from your current account to your savings account, Emma will automatically create a transaction of £20 and update your balance to include this new payment.  

How To Create Smart Rules:

Creating a Smart Rule is a super simple process. Start by going to the Feed tab in the Emma app, select your profile in the top left then scroll down and tap on Smart Rules. Continue by following these steps below: 

1. To create your first Smart Rule click the button that says set a rule. 

2. You then need to select the account that you want to link to your offline account. Press Save.

3. The next step is to identify the transaction that you want to be linked to the offline account. For example, if you have a Freetrade offline account then type Freetrade into the reference box. 

4. If you’re not sure what the reference is, you can check a previous transaction and at the bottom you’ll see the reference in grey. 

5. In the results box below you can also then see how many transactions were detected with this reference. Click into this to make sure you have selected the correct reference.

6. Press next.

7. To complete setting up the rule you then need to pick which offline account the transaction needs to be added to. Using the example above, select your Freetrade offline account. 

8. Finish by pressing the save button. Repeat the process for all your offline accounts. 

Smart Rules Feedback:

As Smart Rules is a new feature, we’d love to know if there’s anything we can do to improve the process. 

Based on feedback from our wonderful Emma Community, we’ve already changed the flow and have added the ability to edit an existing rule. We’ve also picked up a few issues with some references not being detected, so if you’re having problems feel free to drop us a message on the Community, or live chat.