# Merchant recognition > How Bica turns cryptic bank descriptions into merchant names you actually recognize, and what to do when one is wrong. Source: https://trybica.com/docs/merchant-enrichment/ Updated: 2026-08-13 --- Banks rarely tell you who you paid. A coffee at the café downstairs arrives as `POS 4471 REF882931 LX`. A supermarket run shows up as `COMPRA 1234 CONTINENTE MOD`. A subscription might be billed under the name of a payment processor you've never heard of. This is why so many people give up on reviewing their spending. It isn't that the numbers are hard — it's that a list of forty transactions where you recognize twelve of them isn't worth reading. ## What Bica does Bica works out the real merchant behind each transaction and shows that instead: **Continente**, not `COMPRA 1234 CONTINENTE MOD`. Where a business has a recognizable logo, that appears too, which turns a wall of text into something you can scan. Recognition happens on its own, shortly after transactions arrive. You don't tag anything, confirm anything, or wait on a queue. ## It applies backwards, too When Bica recognizes a merchant, it links every matching transaction to it — past and future. Connect an account with two years of history and your old transactions become readable at the same moment your new ones do. That's also why recognition only has to happen once per merchant. The tenth time you buy coffee at the same place, there's nothing left to work out. ## Individuals stay untouched Money you send to people — splitting dinner, paying a friend back — isn't merchant activity, and Bica doesn't try to turn a person's name into a business. Those transactions keep the description your bank gave them. ## When Bica gets it wrong It happens, particularly with small local businesses that share a name with something larger, or with payment processors that obscure who's actually being paid. Two things are true and worth knowing: **Bica would rather leave a transaction alone than label it wrong.** When it isn't confident about a merchant, it doesn't guess. You'll see the raw bank description, which is no worse than what your banking app shows you. This is deliberate: a list where every name is trustworthy is more useful than a list that's fully populated but occasionally fiction. **You can correct it.** Change the merchant on a transaction and the correction sticks for that merchant going forward. Your correction always wins over Bica's guess — see [categorization](/docs/categorization/) for how the same principle applies to categories. ## Why this step exists at all Merchant recognition isn't a feature on its own so much as the thing that makes everything after it work. Categories depend on it: knowing you spent €32 at *Continente* tells you it was groceries, while `COMPRA 1234` tells you nothing. Subscription detection depends on it: a recurring charge is only recognizable as Netflix if the charges can be seen as the same merchant month after month. Your spending breakdowns depend on it: "you spent €280 at supermarkets this month" requires knowing which transactions were supermarkets. It also changes the character of a monthly review. There's a real difference between reading a list of codes and reading a list of places you remember going. One is data entry. The other is recognition — you see *Uber, Uber, Uber, three days in a row* and immediately know why. If you want to put that to use, the [five-minute weekly money review](/guides/weekly-money-review/) is the routine most Bica users settle into. ## What happens next Once a transaction has a recognized merchant, it moves on to [categorization](/docs/categorization/), where it's filed into a spending category. With [autopilot](/docs/autopilot/) on, both steps complete before you next open the app.