Autocat Contains Search Terms

I was going through this guide How to Use AutoCat for Tiller Money Feeds sheets | Tiller Help Center
and based off the “Description Contains” section, that any words in there would be “or-ed” is there a way to make it an “and” ie i want the description to match all the key words, vs any?

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The Contains filter will try to match on the complete text of the cell. For example, if “Description Contains” has “Starbucks Coffee”, it will not try to match on “Starbucks” OR “Coffee”, but rather the full text with the space somewhere contiguous within the description text.

If you want to use multiple match criteria, I’d recommend either using the Regex functionality (which can be a bit complicated), creating discrete rules for all scenarios, or using the “Multiple Match Criteria” approach.

I’m assuming the Multiple Match Criteria means i can have under Description Contain “Starbucks”,coffee"? And that will match with an or?
what I mean by “and” is if i have Description Contain “Starbucks”,“coffee” I want the match require both words, not necessarily together in the description.

Yes, “Starbucks”,coffee" would match with an OR.
But you could do “Starbucks Coffee”, “Starbucks Wholesale Coffee”, “Starbucks Airport Coffee” to get the key permutations— this would be similar to the approach with discrete rules.

If you don’t like the approach :point_up:, you’ll probably need to look into Regex… which… again… can be fussy.

Really appreciate the help, i’ll give it a shot. Main reason for this is I want to make sure that the categorization doesn’t become too catch all, if i use more generic terms vs an actual company’s name. I’ll probably look into regex when I can
one example ijust found was Uber Eats, San Franciscoca and Uber Eats San Francisco, where the comma puts a kink in trying to use “Uber Eats San Francisco” as the search term

And in case anyone searches this later the regesx to find both is “Uber Trip?.San Francisco” you can repeat the ?. for as many spaces as needed it’s basically to find any character 0 to many times, using multiple of the ?. is for as many difference chars as needed.

In that case, I don’t understand why you don’t just use “Uber Eats” as your contains term… As for the regex, you can setup OR statements with those… or you can make them flexible like you show in your example. I’m not an expert.

The uber eat’s was probably not the most encompassing example. Maybe: “Walmart Plus” to code as subscription vs other items from Walmart to code as other items. Unless AutoCat runs first by top down list in the autocat tab then I guess having the “Walmart Plus” first would categorize those first and then having a “walmart” below that would then get the remainders? I guess regex has the ability to exclude specific words

I know this thread is 8 months old but I was running into a similar problem. I suggest to use the Regex feature. For example, on a Zelle transaction, it usually starts with “Zelle” and then ends with someones name, such as Zelle payment from John Doe (Checking XXXXXX1234) to PHIL THE PLUMBER.

So what you could do is the following…

  1. Created a “Full Description Regex” column in AutoCat
  2. Add criteria with a wildcard like Zelle(.*?)PHIL THE PLUMBER
  3. Set what you want to change, such as Category to Home Repairs

The key is using the Regex wildcard (.*?) to capture everything between 2 words (as long as you know the order of the words).

Hope this helps!

Thanks that’s what I ended up doing. But it seems i need to find a way to get an and feature, ie one regex i did was to find att, but that sometimes grabbed things others than phone services. and putting it at the bottom of the list doesn’t always help because sometimes it wouldn’t fit any other auto cat parameters.

I would like to use a regex to match two strings in any order (as an AND match) while being case insensitive so I can match with merchants that mix up their capitalization in a transaction description. For example, if I do the regex (?i)foo.*bar|bar.*foo inside the =REGEXMATCH Google Sheets formula it matches Foo bar and Foo Bar, but I get an error when I try it with AutoCat. Is that because (?i) is not supported in some way inside of Tiller’s Javascript code? Is there a way to write a regex for AutoCat so this will work?

Looks like the same question in two different topics.