How do I keep personal expenses out of my ExpenseBot spreadsheet and tax reports?

You have three levers: classify a real personal purchase as Personal, omit a duplicate or irrelevant transaction, and stop unwanted merchants from being added in future scans. Use the one that matches what actually happened.

1) Clean up personal rows already in your spreadsheet

Use Review expenses instead of deleting spreadsheet rows:

1. Personal: set the transaction or allocation to Personal when it is a real personal purchase. Example: a $42 family dinner.
2. Omit: use Omit for a duplicate or a transaction ExpenseBot should not count at all. Example: the same $75 hotel receipt was imported twice. The row and receipt stay available, but future calculations count only one.
3. Restore: open the Omitted view and restore a transaction if you omitted it by mistake.

Reports you already generated remain snapshots. Omit and restore affect future reports, year-end and tax calculations, exports, analytics, cash insights, reconciliation totals, and scheduled summaries.

2) Stop new personal expenses from being scanned in going forward

Two surfaces, depending on where the receipts come from:

Gmail receipts — Exclusions

Click Scan Gmail for Receipts on the Add Expenses tab → click the Exclusions button (top right). Add either a specific merchant (e.g. Netflix) or a whole category (e.g. Personal) to skip on future scans. Anything excluded is ignored on the next nightly run and labeled ExpenseBot-Excluded in Gmail so you have a clean audit trail.

Bank/card transactions — "Never flag again"

From My Reports, click Review expenses, then Match card activity to launch the reconciliation dashboard. Pick a time period that includes the merchants you don't want, and click Never flag again on each. Skipped merchants appear in the Auto-skipping Merchants dropdown — you can un-skip any of them later.

Teach the AI what's "personal" for you — Personal Identifier wizard

For broad classification (your kids, your pets, your streaming subscriptions, your personal credit card last-4), use Settings → Expense Organization → Personal expense rules. Five short questions, about 90 seconds — and you can re-run it anytime your cards or spending patterns change. After you finish, the nightly Gmail scan tags matching receipts as Personal before they ever hit your sheet. Pairs well with the manual exclusions above — exclusions stop a known merchant, the wizard catches the patterns you didn't think to add.

3) Choose visible exclusions for a Date Range report

When you generate a report, My Reports → New Report → Date Range shows separate exclusion controls for Tags and Expense categories. Personal is selected in both by default. You can remove either default or add other Tags and categories before previewing.

The source spreadsheet is untouched. If you deliberately include Personal activity, ExpenseBot keeps it in a separate Personal - not claimed section and shows a distinct Business / claim total. Report by Tag remains scoped to the Tag you selected and does not add a second category-exclusion step.

4) How Year-End treats Personal and Omitted activity

Year-End reads the complete master ledger for the selected year, including expenses that already appear in another report. It does not inherit filters from a Date Range report.

An expense is Personal for Year-End when its expense category, Tag, or a split allocation is Personal. Any one signal is enough. Personal amounts may be shown for review but never flow into Schedule C, T2125, AU, or UK business deduction lines. Omitted rows do not appear individually; ExpenseBot may show only an omitted count and a Review expenses link.

If you correct a Personal classification or restore an omitted row after generating Year-End, ExpenseBot marks the workbook stale and asks you to regenerate it.

Which lever to pull when

🔗 Full picture: Personal & omitted transactions — effects on reports and tax