Autopilot
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 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 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.
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 — what autopilot is actually doing
- A five-minute weekly money review — the routine that works well with autopilot on