I’m having trouble with an AutoCat Rule that should be overriding a column that I added myself to my Transactions Worksheet. My Fiance and I are hoping to use it to keep track of all of our finance stuff together, so I added a column with a simple dropdown just indicating who each account belongs to so we have that as an option for sorting info. I want to add AutoCat rules that will fill in that column automatically and figured it would be fairly simple.
I’ve tried two different ways so far, one checking the name of the account, then setting the Account Holder field, and the other checking for Account # Ending in #### then overriding Account Holder.
The problem is it doesn’t manage to apply the rule to every transaction that fits the single search criteria I put in. I’ve tried it with a couple different accounts, I’ve tried creating the rules both using the Advanced Rule Builder and just creating it manually in the AutoCat Spreadsheet, and it just doesn’t apply the rule consistently. I haven’t even been able to find a pattern with which transactions the rule gets applied to and which it doesn’t. Am I missing something?
I deleted all the new columns that were added and started from scratch since I had done a number of transactions manually before and I wasn’t sure which ones. Filtering using Account Equals looks like all the transactions that didn’t have the rule applied were categorized as Subscriptions, but it wasn’t all Subscriptions that got skipped. Filtering using Account Number Ends With is all over the place, and I have no idea what is happening there. I made both rules this time with the Advanced Rule Builder in the Sidebar, and I made sure to set it to run on All Transactions. I have screenshots of the results and rules, but It wasn’t letting me add the photos to the post.
I think you’re running into some issues with the expected types. In particular, the “Ends With” filter is for text. Is it possible your Account Numbers are read by Shots as numerical values? More info is here.
Also, I’d recommend deleting the Autocat sheet and letting the add-on re-add it since the headers are pretty fussy if they do not match the conventions exactly.
I just did that and as I’m recreating all my rules, I just noticed that for the Column Override part of the rule in the add-on, choosing to override Category presents me with a dropdown to choose from, while my Account Holder column doesn’t have that, it gives me a text box to type what I want the override to be, despite me having made the cells in that column dropdown menus, and I feel like that may also be part of my problem as well. I’m guessing that the Category Dropdown was created in the Data Validation box as “List from a Range”. Since I formatted my Account Holder Cells using “List of Items” given I don’t expect the things in that list to change, is that maybe why the add-on is treating them differently, and if so how do I fix that without creating a separate sheet just to have 3 items on it forever?
After doing a little bit of reading elsewhere on the forum, I just realized I’m doing what I want to do the hard way, and I can and should just create separate sheets for each set of accounts… Although I’m still curious if my thought about the Dropdowns is correct if I want to add another column sometime in the future.
The Category dropdown in the sidebar is a special case. It is the only column that will present as a dropdown. The sidebar does not check the rules sheet for data validation and try to replicate that. It’s not quite that smart.
Building data validation into your rules sheet is a good idea. You can build the rules there… the validation just won’t be present in the sidebar.
