How clients are created

When Biller parses a forwarded Interac e-Transfer notification email, it extracts the sender's name from the email body. If no client with that name exists in your account, Biller creates one automatically and links the income entry to it.

This means your client list builds itself over time. The first e-Transfer from "Sarah Johnson" creates a client record for Sarah Johnson. Every subsequent e-Transfer from the same name is linked to the same client, giving you a complete payment history per person.

You can also create clients manually before they've paid you -- useful if you want to prepare invoices or keep notes. See Adding clients manually for details.

Biller uses normalized name matching to avoid creating duplicate clients from minor differences in how a name appears across emails. The matching works as follows:

• Case insensitive -- "Sarah Johnson", "SARAH JOHNSON", and "sarah johnson" all match the same client
• Whitespace normalized -- extra spaces between names are ignored
• Consistent ordering -- the name is stored as it first appeared, even if later emails use different capitalization

If a sender's name changes slightly between e-Transfers (for example, their bank displays it differently), Biller may create a separate client. In that case, you can merge clients or reassign income entries from the client detail page. See Editing client details.

In addition to name matching, Biller also captures the sender's email address when it's available in the Reply-To header of the e-Transfer notification. This provides a secondary matching mechanism.

Here's how email matching works in practice:

• If the sender name matches an existing client, the income entry is linked to that client. If the client doesn't have an email on file yet, the captured email is added automatically.
• If the sender name does not match any existing client, but the email address does, Biller matches by email instead and backfills the name if it was missing.
• If neither the name nor the email matches, a new client is created with both pieces of information.

This two-layer approach reduces duplicate clients, especially when a person's name appears differently across banks or over time.