Autocat and Descriptions

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1

My Autocat sheet has three columns with at least one word containing “description”, but I don’t know the differences. The three columns are:

  • Description
  • Description Contains
  • Full Description Contains

Will someone explain the columns’ uses?

2

There’s some info here on Description vs Description Contains:

How to use AutoCat for automatic categorization | Tiller Help Center
→ looks like you can cause AutoCat to CHANGE the original description to standardize it if you want.

I haven’t seen “Full Description Contains”, but since Description and Full Description are 2 different columns in the Transactions sheet (Full Description sometimes being slightly more verbose), it makes sense to me that you could potentially match either one and set a category based on that.

You can also safely delete Full Description Contains if you want. I have neither Description nor Full Description Contains in my Autocat sheet and it works just fine. Tiller makes their logic pretty resilient to different configurations of spreadsheets.

3

I don’t remember whether I read this somewhere or just figured it out, but…

It looks like those columns are pretty generically “Transactions sheet column name” with a suffix describing what kind of matching to do (e.g. “Contains” or “Regex”). My AutoCat sheet currently has the following column names:

  • Category
  • Description
  • Tags
  • Notes
  • Description Contains
  • Full Description Regex
  • Description Equals
  • Account Contains
  • Institution Contains
  • Amount Min
  • Amount Max
  • Full Description Contains
  • Amount Equals
  • Account Equals

A couple of those are columns I added to my Transactions sheet (Tags, Notes) and I’m not sure what the full set of matching suffixes would be (e.g. Contains, Regex, Min, Max, Amount), but it does seem pretty flexible :slight_smile: .

Scott

4

The most basic AutoCat rules will rely most on “Description Contains” to set the rule –> if the description contains “Starbucks”, then assign the category of “Restaurant”. If you want your rules to categorize the data AND clean up the messy Description itself, then you additionally complete the “Description” column to be “Starbucks” so a long string containing Starbucks, store code, transaction date, payment method, etc. will simplify to “Starbucks”. This is useful if you want to later get stats at the Merchant/Description level but personally I think this is too much work if you have a complex/voluminous dataset so I don’t do this in my own personal sheet or the sheets I set up for clients, with the rare exception of some simple and repetitive datasets. If you’re going to use the “Description” column to modify the contents, then I like to base the categorization rule off “Full Description Contains” instead of “Description Contains” because then if you need to re-run rules, you’re not dealing with rules run off of amended Descriptions, and you tied the rule to a column that does not get overwritten.

5

The filter criteria help section shows the recognized suffixes options. These are used for matching purposes.

The column header text preceding the suffix must match a Transaction sheet header name. So, Description Contains uses the Contains matching filter on the Description column.

Otherwise, when the AutoCat header name exactly matches the Transactions sheet header, like Description, AutoCat will write the field and not use it for matching.

Filter Criteria Suffixes

For a column to function as a filter criteria, it must end in one of the following keywords:

  • “Equals” - text equals entire rule string exactly

  • “Contains” - text contains rule string

  • “Starts With” - text starts with rule string

  • “Ends With” - text ends with rule string

  • “Max” - value is less than or equal to rule value

  • “Min” - value is greater than or equal to rule value

  • “Polarity” - value is zero or positive if rule string is “positive”, value is negative if rule string is “negative”

  • “Regex” - supports regex commands.