I stopped using autocat because of too many errors (because I make things too dang complicated) but these new features are just the motivation I need to dive back in and clean it up.
I renamed my old rules sheet and tried out the rule builder. That’s pretty slick! I found it interesting that it was noting the regularity of some of the transactions… building for a future feature maybe?
Anyway I used most of the rules. I deleted a few because they could frequently end up with 2 or more different categories. This is where I’d usually get in trouble before. Perhaps the tool should ignore rules that match multiple categories in the past.
So I ran the rules and much to my surprise it actually found a few transactions. I realized that they were all pretty old, from before my first month’s Budget in Tiller. I think the previous version ignored transactions that were more than 90 days old? Anyway I noticed some inconsistency in the date format. Here’s a screen shot:
Worked like a charm! Thank you so much @heather. This sped up and helped automate so much of my current workflow. It’s the perfect compliment to @mar5’s Monthly Budget Dashboard using Google Data Studio. Since I already have that sending me a weekly summary email, this helped to keep the number of “Uncategorized Transactions” down.
It’s likely just the format for the column has adopted the timestamp. I’d just reset it under the format menu (for the entire column by clicking the column letter) and see if that helps.
That was it, (of course ). It confuses me how that happens in the middle of an automated process. I just noticed some, but not all, of the transaction date formats in my last Feeds update were wonky too. Not a problem, just weird.
One more question,
I assigned a category to transactions if the description contains certain words and the amount is equal to a certain amount.
What I am having trouble with is now, if the amount is above that number, to tag it for manual splitting. It’s not working, first I thought that category must be filled in, so I assigned it a category, but that didn’t work either. Is there an order of preference in autocat or am I doing something wrong?
-Edit- I got it working. There was another thread about autocat and negative numbers. The min/max is reversed because while you put in the negative number, autocat uses the absolute number.
Also, the autocat will not work if the category is already filled out, which is a good thing, but something to note.
There is a “polarity” column you can add to the AutoCat rule sheet to help it understand which polarity the rule should look for.
That’s right, by default. You can change the run setting to have it run against ALL transactions (not just those that are uncategorized) in the AutoCat Run Settings section of AutoCat.
I use this for almost every one of my AutoCat rules. I have some AutoCat rules that only rename the description to a more friendly payee description so that I can categorize it later for department stores where I could be spending grocery money or clothing money.
). It confuses me how that happens in the middle of an automated process. I just noticed some, but not all, of the transaction date formats in my last Feeds update were wonky too. Not a problem, just weird. 
