# Autopilot

> What autopilot decides on your behalf, how to stay in control, and when leaving it off makes sense.

Source: https://trybica.com/docs/autopilot/
Updated: 2026-08-13

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Autopilot decides whether Bica categorizes new transactions on its own, or waits for you.

It's on by default, and you can switch it off at any time from your settings.

## With autopilot on

Transactions are recognized and categorized as they arrive. You open the app and your dashboard is already current — spending breakdowns, category totals, reports, all of it.

This is the setting most people want, and the reason is less about convenience than about whether the habit survives. A tool that needs twenty minutes of tagging before it tells you anything gets used enthusiastically for three weeks and then abandoned. A tool that's already up to date when you open it gets checked on a Sunday morning for two years.

## With autopilot off

Transactions still arrive and merchants are still recognized, so your list stays readable. But categories wait for you to assign them.

Reasons to actually want this:

- **You're new and calibrating.** Watching what Bica proposes for a few weeks before letting it act is a reasonable way to build trust in it.
- **Your spending is unusual.** If you're self-employed and the line between business and personal runs through the middle of the same merchants, you may prefer to make each call yourself.
- **You're setting up rules.** Reviewing manually for a while shows you where your [rules](/docs/categorization/) need to go.

The cost is real, though: uncategorized transactions accumulate, and a backlog of two hundred is a chore nobody does. If you turn autopilot off, review weekly.

## Autopilot never has the last word

Whether autopilot assigned a category or you did, you can change it. Corrections are remembered for that merchant, so the same fix isn't needed twice.

Autopilot also never overrides a decision you've already made. Your rules and your past corrections take precedence over anything it would otherwise choose — see [categorization](/docs/categorization/) for the full order of precedence.

## What autopilot does not do

Autopilot only affects categorization. It doesn't move money, change your bank connections, or act on your accounts in any way — Bica's access to your bank is read-only regardless of any setting, as described in [security](/docs/security/).

It also doesn't hide anything. There's no bucket of transactions Bica quietly handles on your behalf; every transaction it categorized is in the same list as the ones you did, marked with the category it chose, ready to be changed.

## Related

- [Categorization](/docs/categorization/) — what autopilot is actually doing
- [A five-minute weekly money review](/guides/weekly-money-review/) — the routine that works well with autopilot on