New AutoCat (beta) features in the Tiller Money Feeds add-on for Google Sheets

We’re excited to announce some new features in AutoCat (beta) for faster and easier rule building right from the Tiller Money Feeds add-on sidebar.

Highlights

  • Create simple rules right from the sidebar
  • Have AutoCat suggest new rules from recurring transactions in the last 90 days
  • Select one or more transactions and quickly generate simple or advanced rules
  • Toggle on the Advanced Rule Builder for enhancing your customization experience beyond just categorization rules.

Watch a quick demo of these new features

What do you think?

Feel free to reply here and share your feedback or issues using these new features.

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SPOT ON!!! Just did the 90 day trick and it did 17 new rules with zero errors. Very very cool. Thank you.

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This Is Pretty Cool!!

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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:

autocat dates

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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.

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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 :man_facepalming:). 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. :slight_smile:

Does it put the auto-created rules into the existing autocat sheet? I just ran it and it doesn’t look like any new rules were added.

Never mind - i didn’t press the right button. LOVE THIS!

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Heather, y’all just continue to blow me away! I could not be happier with abandoning Quicken and making the move to Tiller. Fantastic! :clap:

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Wow, love this. Thanks Tiller!

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Is there anyway to do a split transaction with Autocat?

Hi @yossiea, AutoCat doesn’t split transactions right now, but you can use the Tiller Money Labs add-on for that at this time.

Pretty awesome feature! I’d love to see an “auto rename description” option.

@fambly, you can do this with an advanced rule :slight_smile:

I put together this quick YouTube video to show you how

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One more question, :slight_smile:
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.

Awesome @heather! Game changer! Thanks for the quick reply :slightly_smiling_face:

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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.

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