⚠️ IMPORTANT⚠️  
​This content is only for sheets created after August 26, 2019. They will not work for sheets powered by the Feed Bot. AutoCat for Feed Bot is no longer supported, if you're using a Feed Bot sheet please transition to a new Tiller Money Feeds powered Google Sheet.

Troubleshooting guide is here

AutoCat allows you to automatically categorize transactions and override other columns in the Transactions sheet using a customized rule set. 

After install the AutoCat rule sheet (tab) should appear. It comes pre-populated with an example rule.

If you upgraded your AutoCat sheet from the previous version an archive of the original rule sheet is created.

AutoCat uses filter and override columns in the rule set to understand how to read your Transactions sheet and apply the rules based on your customized criteria. AutoCat only makes changes to the Transactions sheet.

At the most basic level AutoCat will categorize transactions based on a set of criteria you customize on the AutoCat sheet. More advanced rules can be created with additional columns to further customize and build a more complex rule set.

Information about advanced rule options is included below.

Out of the box AutoCat helps you build simple categorization rules based on the Description column in your Transactions sheet.

Type in a keyword into the “When Description contains” field in the sidebar and assign a category. You can also select one or more rows in your Transactions sheet and use the “Rule from Selection” option to help fill in the Description Contains filter criteria. Modify the Description Contains criteria as needed and then click “Create rule” or “Create & Run” if you’d like to go ahead and run AutoCat against all your rules.

AutoCat will add the new rule to your AutoCat sheet at the bottom of the list. Keep in mind that rules are processed in a top down order, but you can easily rearrange the rule order by clicking and holding a row number and dragging the row to a new position.

AutoCat can also suggest rules from repeating transactions from the last 90 days. Click the “Rules from Past 90 days” icon to get rule suggestions. AutoCat will ignore any transactions that already have a “Categorized Date” in the Transactions sheet (far right column) so as not to suggest rules you might already have in your ruleset.

Most of the time a simple “Description Contains” filter will work for a basic rule set to capture recurring transactions and those with a description that are always categorized the same.

Choose a Category from the dropdown, enter “Description Contains” keyword(s) into that column in the ruleset and you have a basic rule. 

Run AutoCat via the Tiller Money Feeds add-on sidebar > AutoCat

Example rule:
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Apply “Yoga” to all transactions where the Description Contains “asheville Commuussq” for example.

This would categorize any transaction that contains that text in the description as “Yoga.”

Case & contains sensitivity

The filter criteria (Description Contains) is case insensitive, but it is literally a contains. So if you have a rule that just has the criteria for Description contains as “air” - perhaps for “Allegiant air" any other description that contains the word “air,” including in the middle of a word, would get categorized under that rule. So slightly more detailed/specific is better.

You can also use the Account Contains and Institution Contains in a similar manner to drill down even further.

Use the amount min and amount max columns to set the minimum and maximum for the amount that the rule should look for. Enter these as absolute values.

If you need an exact match, enter that amount into both the min and max columns. E.g. if you want to set up a rule for your mortgage check that’s consistent every month you can use the Description Contains “Check #” and then use the Amount range $1200 for both the min and max.

After you have installed and built a rule set you can run AutoCat using the Tiller Money Feeds add-on sidebar. Click the “Run AutoCat” button in the sidebar or run AutoCat as you’re creating new rules.

You can run the ruleset against only uncategorized transactions (default) or your entire transactions sheet. You can configure this under the AutoCat Run Settings section in the AutoCat sidebar.

If you choose to have it run on all transactions (including those that are already categorized) this will overwrite existing categorizations where a rule matches so use this feature carefully.

You can turn on the Auto Run on Update setting under AutoCat Run Settings to have AutoCat automatically categorize transactions as they're added to your Transactions sheet. The automatic processing only works for newly added transactions. It will not automatically categorize transactions that were already in the sheet on the next sheet update. You can manually run AutoCat to categorize those transactions that already exist in your sheet.

The rules are processed in a top down order, so put your most fine grained (specific) rules at the top of the sheet and broader (generic) rules lower down. 

You can sort the AutoCat sheet if you turn the filter on in the sheet or drag and drop rows to rearrange the order of your rules. 

AutoCat allows you to build rules to override and automate data customization in other columns in the Transactions sheet beyond just the Category column.

For example, if you wanted to apply a Tag in a Tags column in the Transactions sheet based on content in the Description column (or any other column in the Transactions sheet) you could build a rule to do this.

You can use the AutoCat sidebar to easily build advanced rules by toggling on the Advanced Rule Builder. This is a quick and easy way to add column overrides to your AutoCat sheet and do more than just categorize with AutoCat.

A quick explainer on some of these concepts and how to build a rule to clean up descriptions:

In the AutoCat rules sheet, each column performs one of two functions:

In our basic rule below the Description Contains column is the "Filter Criteria" and the Category column in the Transactions sheet is the column that will be overridden with the content I selected in the Category column on the AutoCat rules sheet. 

Note: AutoCat does not process rules for columns formatted as a Date in the Transactions sheet.

Filter criteria columns in the rules sheet determine if a transaction should be processed. (i.e. does the Transaction meet this criteria?)

A column is recognized as a filter criteria when it has a filter criteria suffix. (e.g. contains, equals, starts with, ends with) The full list of suffix options are below.

Filter criteria are AND-ed together— for a transaction to be processed, it must meet all non-blank rules.

Filter criteria columns must start with the column name to be searched. For example, “Description Contains” will search the column named “Description.” If a column does not exist in the Transactions sheet, the filter criteria is ignored. This is case sensitive. Make sure the first word in the criteria is capitalized. (i.e "Description contains" NOT "description contains")

Any Transactions-sheet column name can be used for a filter criteria. This includes custom columns you add that are not default in the Transactions sheet. Great examples are Tags, Note, or Client.

For a column to function as a filter criteria, it must end in one of the following keywords:

If you'd like to have one of your AutoCat rules search based on the polarity of the Amount column (positive or negative amounts) you can add an Amount Polarity column to your AutoCat sheet. Otherwise the Amount Min and Amount Max columns that are default columns in the AutoCat sheet are expecting absolute values.

If you want AutoCat to look for negative amounts (expenses or outflows) put the word "Negative" (without quotes) in the Amount Polarity column for that rule. If you want it to look for positive amounts (inflows, income, or refunds) put the word "Positive" (without quotes) in the Amount Polarity column for that rule.

AutoCat supports multiple match criteria in text filter criteria fields.

For example, a “Description Contains” rule can be:

Multiple match criteria are OR-ed. In other words, the rule will be applied if the row matches just one of the keywords in the list for the rule.

Each multiple-match criteria keyword must be wrapped in quotes and separated by commas. 

AutoCat can also handle regular expressions. The use of regex in AutoCat rules is supported in the Tiller Community. Learn more about using Regex with AutoCat here.

Add a column name and append the Regex suffix to it to build rules using regular expressions. E.g. the column in the AutoCat sheet would be "Description Regex" or "Account Regex" (no quotes).

Examples of terms here: https://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/notes/regex/ 8

You can delete rows and add columns to the AutoCat sheet. You can also freeze the top row.

Override columns are any columns in the AutoCat rules sheet that are not recognized as filter criteria (i.e. they do not have a suffix). If a transaction matches on the rule's filter criteria, the values in any override columns for the rule will be applied to those columns in the matching rows on the Transactions sheet. 

The first version of AutoCat only recognized Category column overrides. With AutoCat, any Transactions sheet column name can be used for an override. 

For example, if we had a rule with “Description Contains” = “Starbucks” and “Description” = “Starbucks”

The transaction:

Would be updated after AutoCat runs with:

This feature is great if you want to clean up your descriptions. You can use a single rule to clean up descriptions and categorize. In the basic rule example above all Starbucks transactions would be categorized as Coffee and the descriptions would be unified to just say "Starbucks" instead of including the extra details about which specific Starbucks store it was.

It's important to note that once a transaction matches on one rule, it won't match on other rules so if you want to clean up or customize other columns you would exclude those entries from multiple match criteria rules. E.g. if you put Starbucks in a multi-match rule for "coffee" you won't be able to clean the descriptions up for Starbucks. 

By default override columns other than Category are not included in the AutoCat ruleset sheet. If you want to build additional override rules for Description, other default Transactions sheet columns, or your own columns (see next section) you need to manually add these columns to the AutoCat ruleset sheet by inserting columns (right click a column to insert).

Custom columns you add to the Transactions sheet can also be used for override rules in the AutoCat sheet.

For example, if you added a column called “Tags” to your transaction sheet you can build an override rule to automatically tag transactions by adding that column and the criteria to the AutoCat sheet.