Dear Tiller fans,
I now have a working setup of Tiller after having done Mint for some years. The disadvantage to using Tiller (among its obvious advantages) is that we don’t get a million of categories for free. We have to create each one in a long and painstaking process every month.
How is everyone coping with that?
I was thinking of going into Mint and seeing if I can create an export of categorization based on my history. I’ll post if I get anywhere - and looking for other suggestions.
Have you looked at the Autocat? You create it once, and then it runs every time you load new transactions. You can access Autocat from the Tiller menu, or even edit it yourself on the Autocat sheet.
Hi @kate,
This is how I have been working to address categories/groups and to hopefully learn from others: Category & Groups
Here is the Google Sheet link
I have found in fairly short time that once I refined the categories and groups to my style and then using AutoCat to categorize and rename transactions that Tiller is far better than the other tools I have used.
Hope this feedback and suggestion helps!
P.S. I’d enjoy learning from what you export from Mint.
Welcome to Tiller, @kate. As @pete & @yossiea note, Autocat is your friend. It takes care of about 75% of my transactions monthly and is easy to setup.
Thanks all! I have been using autocat extensively, but not for credit card transactions. Autocat won’t help without an exhaustive list of stores, restaurants, shops and websites. 
So what I am asking is, how is everyone coping with the fact that each month you’ll have to create many new autocat categories or abandon categorization for spending accounts.
Based on this thread, I am guessing everyone really does manually set those up. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a large autocat template that has some of these goodies?
Hi @kate – Can you post an example of a store, restaurant, shop, or website that is not working for you with Autocat? I’m wondering if you are using the full string of the transaction description rather than excerpting the parts that are constant (some transactions will show date specific information or other unique coding) and that is why it feels like you have to recreate the wheel each time? Are you sure you have your Categories tab correctly set up? You shouldn’t have to recreate anything monthly once you’re up and running.
You can grab your Mint categories by:
@kate Are you saying that when you shop from a store for the first time (at least first time since using Tiller), you have to manually select which category it is, unlike with Mint where it would auto populate a logical category for you?
I think a major challenge with that is that we all categorize different stores differently. I moved away from Mint primarily because I got tired of it incorrectly guessing the category for me, but then I wouldn’t make the effort to fix it. With Tiller, I’m more likely to ensure everything gets categorized correctly.
Hey @Kate! Like others (I think), I don’t have Autocat rules for all of my transactions, just the ones that turn up frequently. For my family, that amounts to about 50 rules (built over several years). These rules probably categorize 60% of what we spend each month and I do the rest manually. We use it for banking & credit accounts.
You’re right that if you want AutoCat to do all the work for you, you would need an exhaustive list of rules that you consistently add to each time AutoCat misses a transaction.
One neat thing about AutoCat is that you can use “multi-criteria rules” so you could have a single rule for all your restaurants, and you just keep updating the criteria. E.g. Description contains “Chipotle”,“Frank’s”,“Mellow Mushroom” etc
You might also experiment with the “Category Hint” column if you really just want it done for you. We don’t have a whole lot of documentation or topics about it, but if you insert a column into your Transactions sheet and call it “Category Hint” (without the quotes) it will fill in a category going forward (heads up, it does not retroactively fill transactions already in your sheet).
You could also start in a new sheet, insert the Category Hint column, and then fill it with your data to see what you get.
In the past, this column was hit or miss on accuracy, but it is a starting place, and I think it’s gotten better.
Setting up your Budget sheets to use Category Hint instead of Category would be something you’d need to do on your own, it’s not something we have documentation for or necessarily support, but it’s definitely doable and I’m 100% sure some savvy community person here could write up a show & tell for something like this.
Looking at you @jpfieber @Brad.warren @adambecker @cculber2 @jono @randy 
Hello folks,
I think I am dealing with the same issue migrating from mint. Are there any “default” rules that exist somewhere that I can apply just to get me started? Is there any way tiller can “attempt” to categorize with Autocat?
Hi!
Like @kate and Abdullah I am migrating from Mint and so far the only thing I’m missing is a good “starter set” of rules for common restaurant chains, gas stations, home improvement stores, etc…
This seems like an obviously useful tool to get people started, similar to @pete 's link above for common categories. Nobody has shared something like that?
I understand what you’re looking for @filiberto8 & @abdullah.f.hamed. (Welcome from Mint BTW!)
I don’t believe there is a useful shared set of common rules because rules are so personal. Most of us have 10-20 vendors we frequent and then another 30-40 that are less common. The goal with AutoCat is to build simple rules for the common transactions that make up the bulk of your feeds allowing you to make quick work of the scattershot uncommon transactions that remain.
Build a solid starter set of rules that will take care of 1/2 of your transactions will probably only take about 20 minutes and serve you long into the future.
@Heather has a good demo on some powerful workflows in the Autocat menu to get started. Pay attention to the video under “AutoCat New Features as of August 12, 2020”.
Hope this helps.
I have the same request as @kate . Coming from Mint, it’s surprising that a tool like this doesn’t apply categories automatically. I’ve read the thread, I don’t buy the idea that categories are so personal the tool shouldn’t even attempt it. 90% of transactions can be categorized automatically: Netflix and Patreon are always “Subscription.” Shell & Chevron are always “Gas.” Water and electric are always “Utilities.” Is this really an alien concept?
I don’t see the point of a category called “Subscription”. I would consider Netflix “Entertainment”, so I appreciate that I have control over my categorization.
I categorize my Shell & Chevron transactions based on the amount as to whether it was a gasoline purchase at the pump or whether I walked inside and made a convenience store purchase, so I like the flexibility to make my own categorization. Sure a list of “suggested” or “commonly categorized as” defaults could be made as a starting point but I personally don’t think there would be much time savings over just setting it how I like to see it. Ex. McDonald’s categorization depends whether I made the purchase and want to categorize it as Lunch so I can get a closer look at how often I’m buying lunch out or if I bought for my kids and call it Restaurant.
What I think would be really interesting and useful is a tool that streamlines the AutoCat set-up- looks at all of your transactions, aggregates the most common ones, perhaps has a suggested categorization, but allows you to override and set your own. It could also compare against your existing rules, so you could use it as a workflow to periodically audit and update your AutoCat. You could copy/paste the result into AutoCat. Maybe something like it already exists in the community. There’s a Recurring Expenses solution that provides a great starting point.
Did you try the “Category Hint” column mentioned upthread? If you want automatic categorization, that can do it for you.
I used to think the same about the “Subscriptions” category, but I’ve recently come around to it as I think it’s a great way for people to periodically review what subscriptions are still active.
I can appreciate that perspective. I’d still categorize the transactions more directly to budget related concerns, but perhaps include a tag that it’s a subscription. Maybe a template that then showed all your subscriptions, along with renewal dates, etc would be a good place to review those. Thought there was a template for doing something like that, but my search isn’t finding it…
As @Caroleen mentioned the Category Hint is going to be the best guess at categorization based on incoming data. All you need to do is add a column in your transaction sheet named exactly “Category Hint” without the quotes. This will only apply to new data coming in from Tiller so exisiting data won’t be modified. Depending on the useability of this data for you, you could map the resulting hint to your category column if it matches on your category sheet. I’m not quite the worksheet ninja to be able to tell you how quickly but it would definitely be possible.