I made an add-in for Excel that uses AI APIs (OpenAI or Google Gemini) to look at my existing transaction categories, and automatically assign a category from my spreadsheet’s categories list to transactions that don’t yet have a category, based on the same general patterns and the AI’s overall knowledge. For my personal transactions it gets it mostly correct - out of 100 transactions categorized, there’s usually a handful that I correct myself but a lot of them are understandable - for instance, newly seen merchants where nothing in the name gives a clue as to what it is.
You can get it from my github repo here. Unfortunately it isn’t straightforward to install - the add-in isn’t published to Microsoft’s store, you have to “side-load” it as per Microsoft’s instructions for developing add-ins (see link in the repo.)
If anyone else does try it out anyway, I’d be interested to hear their thoughts & experience with it.
Yeah, it’s a shame there isn’t a way to make this easier for someone to just pick up and use.
If it were to be published to Microsoft’s Office store, it would alleviate all the “sideloading” nonsense and let people find and install by name from within Excel. That wouldn’t help with the API keys though. It would be annoying to have to put your own key back in every time you use the add-in, but there really isn’t a suitable place to persist it. And also, the kind of user who is comfortable going to OpenAI or Gemini and getting their own API key (and knowing what that means) can probably also do the sideloading thing.
I could try to make it a separate paid product myself, pipe all the API calls through my own servers, and charge users for it myself, but it’s hard to see a market for this kind of thing being large enough to make that worth it. The add-in would need a lot more polishing and UI improvement, and a whole server side would be needed, etc - and then a customer would need to decide it’s worth it to sign up for that (separate from Tiller) and pay for it separately.
Tiller could build this type of thing into Tiller’s own add-in, using their own API keys from their own servers. They’d need a pricing model that lets them pass through the AI inference costs to their customers, but they’re already passing the transactions through their own servers anyway. They could apply it on the server without needing any additional client side plugins. Since they’re already billing the users one could imagine doing this as an optional add-on to your plan. I don’t work for Tiller, I just use it for my own personal use, so I have no idea if this is or isn’t on their radar.
Speculation: sometime in medium term future, will office’s “copilot” functionality end up being able to do this whole job with just a prompt? Instead of an add-in we’d just be sharing the prompt that makes Copilot do all the spreadsheet manipulation. No add-in needed, just detailed instructions in the prompt. As far as I know this isn’t possible today, but in the near future maybe?
