Now Available: AutoCat for Microsoft Excel

Originally published at: Now Available: AutoCat for Microsoft Excel - Tiller

Categories are the key in keeping track of your spending and earning. They’re so important, there’s a two year old Tiller Community topic sharing and brainstorming on category lists that garners engagement month after month.

Tiller makes it super easy to customize your categories list. We offer a simple place to get started with example categories and groups in our Foundation Template budget spreadsheet, but then the sky’s the limit.

You can easily customize your transaction categories to meet your unique financial preferences and situation.

The challenging part of using any financial tool is making sure that your actual spending data is accurately and promptly categorized. A lot of tools attempt to do this for you, but they get it wrong, and that’s frustrating. Tiller doesn’t try to guess your spending categories, instead we empower you to choose what’s best for you.

And today, we’re giving you the power to automate that with your own custom rule set in Microsoft Excel.

For years AutoCat for Google Sheets has been one of Tiller’s most beloved features and we’re excited to offer AutoCat for Excel to help you more easily manage your money, your way.

How AutoCat for Excel works

AutoCat allows you to build your own custom rule set based on your transactions to automatically categorize transactions.

This saves so much time. You can set AutoCat to run your rules when you click the Fill button in Microsoft Excel to add new transactions and balances to your spreadsheet.

You can also do so much more than categorize transactions with AutoCat. Use it to clean up descriptions, apply notes, tags, and more.

We hope you’ll love this feature for Microsoft Excel as much as you’ve loved it for Google Sheets. You can read more about how to use it and how it works on our Help Center here.

Please share your feedback below!

3 Likes

Wow, thank you Heather and Tiller team!

Would you say that the base spreadsheet for excel now has feature parity with google sheets (without all of the extra add ons of course). I’ve been thinking about switching to Excel but autocat has kept me tied to the Google Sheets version.

2 Likes

This is brilliant - thank you so much!!! In addition to the basic AutoCat features, I see that it works on custom columns (e.g. “Subcategory”), as well as clean-up for description and account names. So happy about this! :smile:

1 Like

@cximran there are some key features available in Google Sheets not yet available for Excel that we hope to build out in the coming months, but I can’t give specific timelines or the order of things.

  • Manual account balance tracking
  • Ability to refresh accounts in the sidebar (right now for Excel you have to go to the Console if you need to manually refresh accounts or edit account credentials)
  • Split transactions
  • Insights sheet for the Foundation Template is still missing for Excel, but coming pretty soon.

If you don’t use those features then no harm in switching at this point.

Glad you’re psyched about it @danny.shively ! We are too :slight_smile:

Fantastic!!! I am very new to Tiller and very rusty with Excel. I was hoping that AutoCat for Excel would get released quickly. This is going to be so helpful when I go to pull in my Mint data from the last five years.

Thank you Heather and team for this.

1 Like

Copied over my AutoCat sheet from Google and it ran as expected. Nice work!

1 Like

Great work! I am on day 3 of running both sheets and xlsx side by side to get a feel for what works for me and my family. I love that you found a way to make this work in xlsx. The sheer responsiveness is giving me goosebumps. :heart:

1 Like

Worked right away for me.

1 Like

Nice.
Long time coming - very exciting.
Question - I saw a couple of mentions about things like the sidebar for creating rules not yet in the Excel version. Does AutoCat for Excel support advanced features like regex rules? If not, is this planned?
I want to test migrating my google sheets AutoCat rules to Excel and want to have a sense of any current limitations.

1 Like

It’s now no longer working on my end. I get a message, “Autocat failed to run.”

1 Like

This is likely the issue, @yossiea— especially given what you just posted in the other thread about Groups.

I was testing out AutoCat on a new Excel sheet linked to my accounts and it worked fine. Trying to use it with my existing sheet (with a lot more transaction data) and I’m getting “Autocat failed to run” error. Any ideas on how to solve this?

@psavini :point_up: take a look at the above messages on this, it’s a know issue :slight_smile:

I tried clicking the link and I end up at a page that says " Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private."

Sorry @psavini - that’s my bad. I didn’t realize it was going to the a page only accessible to the beta group. Here’s the content you need: AutoCat for Microsoft Excel | Tiller Help Center

Basically, it breaks when you have formulas in the transactions sheet right now. We’ll get it fixed, but ETA is a bit out.

Ok thanks that makes sense then. Reality is if AutoCat works the way it should you don’t really need any formulas (at least the way I was using them).

1 Like

I have been using Tiller Money (Excel) for only 30 days, but the AutoCat feature has been working as expected so far.

1 Like

I just received an email asking how Autocat for Excel is going. I love it! I sorted my transactions by description, put in a new rule for each one for which I see multiple transactions. Now, when I hit the fill sheet button (which I configured to run the Autocat), almost every transaction is already categorized. If not, I make a new rule for any that are uncategorized and hit the run Autocat button to test it. Boom - done! I’ve made use of the min/max fields to help me sort out “snacks” from “gas” at gas stations, as I’m prone to do too much of the former and thus track it as a category. I also like the “Polarity” matching criteria which I use to count payments made to pay down debt in my budget (negative values) but not the positive corresponding payment transaction received with the same description (which would cancel them out if I treated that strictly as a transfer). All-in-all great features and implementation!

1 Like

I built my budget sheet with the beta autocrat and it works fine. Now that you have rolled out the new version, what do I need to do to convert from beta autocrat to the new product?

Hi @keleghan if you’re happy using the same sheet you don’t need to do anything. The AutoCat button is now on the main sidebar rather than in a hidden “beta” section of the add-in’s sidebar.