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The bookkeeping inbox is one person and Zeno processing pending bank-feed items side by side. You open a session, pull in a batch, and work through it together — Zeno proposing in groups, you approving, correcting, or setting aside. Open it from Zeno → Inbox.
This is badged Experimental in the app, and the badge is honest — the surface is still moving. The rules, knowledge, and log layers underneath it are not experimental; they run the everyday bank-feed review whether or not you use this workspace.
Staging Pipeline

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Why a session

A queue two people are working at once is a queue two people double-enter. A session is Zeno’s answer: it’s a real record with a start, a finish, and a hold on the items inside it. While you have items pulled into a session, they’re yours. Someone else — a colleague, or Zeno in another conversation — can’t pull the same rows out from under you. Abandon a session and the hold lapses on its own after half an hour, so a closed browser tab never strands work. Sessions are also the audit unit. Everything that happened inside one stays attached to it: what was pulled, what was applied, what was skipped and why.

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Working a batch

Pull items into the session — filter by status, account, date range, or search, or name specific rows. Zeno groups what you pulled by payee before you look at it, so a hundred charges arrive as a handful of clusters. The grouping splits by cardholder as well as merchant, because on a shared card who spent decides which cost center it belongs to. It also normalizes the noise banks add — the TST* and SQ * prefixes, store numbers, trailing city and state — so one merchant reads as one merchant. Each cluster carries a suggested account when every item in it already agrees, a suggested vendor when the name matches one of yours, the item count, and the total.

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Applying

Two shapes. Know which one you’re in. One category across many items. The ordinary case: a cluster of twelve charges that are all Repairs. Approve the group and they post together. Many categories across one item. A single payment covering several jobs — a check whose memo reads 2300 — Ashbury Residences, 250 — Parkview Court. Split it into legs, each with its own account or cost center. A split has to add up. The legs must sum to the item’s amount, and Zeno checks that before anything posts, so a mistake comes back naming the actual discrepancy instead of surfacing later as an unbalanced ledger. Splits are also atomic here. The whole split posts as one operation, so a failure can’t leave a half-categorized transaction behind.
On a batch of more than a few items, apply one first and look at it in the register before releasing the rest. Zeno will suggest this itself; it’s worth taking.

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Matching what’s already there

Not every feed item is new spend. Plenty are echoes of something already in your register — a payment imported from another system, a check you entered by hand, a payout that posted ahead of the bank. Those need matching, not categorizing. Categorize an echo and you’ve counted it twice. Zeno surfaces candidates by amount and date within the same account, in two shapes:
  • One to one — link the item to the existing register row.
  • Many to one — a deposit that covers several payments. Zeno moves the individual payments through Undeposited Funds and posts the single bank-side deposit that sums them, which is how a bank’s one-line deposit reconciles against your several invoices.

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Skipping and noting

Skip takes an item out of your session without touching it — it goes back to the queue for someone else or a later pass. Skipping is recorded with a reason, so the next person knows why it’s still there. Notes are session-scoped commentary: what you decided partway through, what you want to check. They live with the session. For anything worth remembering past today, use the work log instead. It’s dated, it survives the session, and it’s where you’d look in three months to answer “why is this categorized this way.” See How the AI works.

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Closing out

Close the session with a summary of what you did. Items still held are released; everything the session touched stays linked for the audit trail. The session page keeps the story: the timeline of what was pulled, applied, skipped, and noted, in order, with the totals for each action.

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What Zeno won’t do on its own

Working the queue with Zeno is a conversation, not a hand-off. It’s instructed to state a cluster’s pattern, count, and proposed account, then wait for you. It also won’t guess at a split it can’t determine. Handed a check for several jobs with no readable breakdown, it leaves the item pending and asks rather than approximating.

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Where to go next

  • Rules — turning a cluster you keep approving into a rule that fires at ingest.
  • Knowledge & rules — recording the judgment calls a rule can’t hold.
  • Books — the review queue this workspace sits over.