Regarding AutoCat, Is it accurate to say that rules created with the “Simple Rule Builder” are case sensitive but rules created with “Advanced Rule Builder” are not?
ScottC
I’m not sure if this is the right place to post this so I apologize if it isn’t.
I’m relatively new to Tiller but I love it. I use Tiller primarily because of its Categorization tools. Tiller has the potential to automatically and accurately categorize many more transactions than other systems I’ve tried including Mint and Personal Capital. As a relatively new user, most of my learning curve is related to learning the tools you provide to categorize transactions consistently and, to a lesser extent, cleaning up the Descriptions provided by the financial institutions I’m connected to. This is why AutoCat is so important to me.
I agree with your comment about from July 2020 about the need for more documentation regarding AutoCat. This is especially true regarding Regex. I completely misunderstood how Regex worked in Tiller. I’m still not 100% sure I understand so I agree that more documentation, screenshots showing the contents of cells in the Description Regex column would be helpful as would a short video.
I thought I had to manually add a column such as “Description Regex” to my AutoCat sheet and enter Sheets-compatible formulas in the cells. e.g. =RegexMatch(text, regular_expression). As I think I understand it now, if I want to categorize McDonalds, Burger King, and Chick-fil-a as “Fast Food” without working about their case, the entry in Description Regex would look like McDonalds | Burger King | Chick-fil-a.
In reading this post between you and wizavi, I didn’t understand that you (Randy) were talking about rules created in the Advanced Rule Builder being case insensitive. I was confused because other posts specifically say that AutoCat rules ARE case sensitive.
In summary, AutoCat is one of Tiller’s “killer features” but it could be more accessible with a better documentation.
ScottC
OK, this right here—AutoCat by Regex— is the feature that has just sold me on Tiller. Sweet!
The only thing I’m missing is the ability to back-reference my capturing groups to tidy up the replacement column. For example, my rule to categorize and tidy up pharmacies has this Description Regex:
(CVS|Walgreens|(Missoula|Granite|406 Clinic) Pharmacy)
The Category for all of them is “Pharmacy”, but the tidied description should be just the pharmacy name (e.g. “CVS” or “Missoula Pharmacy”) extracted from all the other clutter that comes in the description. So what I’d like to put in the Description column as the tidy replacement text is $1, but even though the match is a regex, the replacement gets treated like literal dollar-sign 1.
Wouldn’t it be sweet if users could make use of captured regex groups like this?
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For it to be more mainstream and gain further adoption, I think you’re going to have to code a Regex builder into the AutoCat sidebar. Regex is just so fussy but extremely powerful.
Thanks for your feedback, @King_Flippy_Nips. Recommend adding a feature request for this. Regex is definitely an undocumented power feature for sure.
Is it possible to use Regex to populate the Description column?
For example, the Description is “DD DOORDASH THAI BAKERY” and I want to change it to “DoorDash (Thai Bakery)”.
hi @abhiroopb you dontt have to use Regex to do this. Just add a “Description” column to the AutoCat sheet and put in the Description that you want in there with Description Contains as “DD DOORDASH THAI BAKERY”
More on override columns here: AutoCat for Google Sheets | Tiller Help Center
Thanks Heather. The problem is I order from different places so it’s not always “THAI BAKERY”. Hence why I’d prefer to use something dynamic.
I have wondered the same, something along these lines, where the parenthesis saves the matching value to be used as a replace string. Multiple parenthesis groups means multiple vars, $1, $2, etc. Parenthesis in the destination is treated as a string and not a special character.
| Description Regex | Description |
|---|---|
| DOORDASH (.*) | DoorDash ($1) |
| DOORDASH \(.*\) | DoorDash (\1) |
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It’s a suggestion of how this feature might work. I don’t believe it’s currently supported.
I understand— and like— what you’re trying to do, @Mark.S, but unfortunately that won’t work. In the existing Autocat tooling, there is no communication between the filter and override regexes even when they are in the same rule.
I agree that this functionality could be useful in some cases.