I built a free AI agent for auto-categorizing Tiller transactions

Spreadsheets gSheets Templates
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Hey everyone! I’ve been a Tiller user for many years and my least favorite part has always been categorizing transactions. I generally leave transactions uncategorized for months and then I would have to spend hour categorizing them. AutoCat helps but doesn’t catch everything, especially new merchants or ambiguous ones.

As a software consultant in my day job, I built an AI agent that does it for me. It reads `(Blank)` transactions from my Tiller sheet, looks at my existing categories and past transaction
history, and categorizes new ones automatically. It writes the category back to the sheet and I don’t have to do anything.

The part I’m most proud of: it sends me a daily email digest listing what it categorized, and I can just reply to the email with corrections. Like if it put a Costco run under Groceries but it was actually for the office, I reply with 3: Office Supplies and it re-categorizes it. That’s the whole workflow.

Privacy note: I saw the conversation in the other GPT thread and I share those concerns. This runs entirely on your own machine. Your financial data never passes through my servers or anyone else’s. The only external call is to the AI model for categorization (you bring your own API key via OpenRouter, so you pick the model and control the relationship). I’m open to implementing an Ollama integration if people want to use a model local to their machine (or on a server you host). Everything else stays local.

It’s free for personal use: GitHub - jevy/bookkeeper-agent: Intelligent agent for bookkeeping when using Tillerhq · GitHub

It does require some technical setup (Docker, AWS for email, an OpenRouter API key), so it’s not a one-click install yet. If you’re comfortable with that kind of thing, I’d love for you to try it and tell me what you think. And if you’re not technical but this sounds useful, I’m working on a hosted
version that would be much simpler, there’s a signup link on the repo.

Happy to help anyone get set up right here in this thread.

2 Likes
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@organized_money this is interesting! I’m going to move to Google Sheets > Templates (formerly “Show & Tell”) category.

Have you tried AI Suggest (Beta) for Google Sheets? It should better handle the new merchants or ambiguous ones situation.

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I love this. I’m been toying with the idea of building something like this but just haven’t made the time. I’m going to test this out. I love the idea of doing this with Ollama. Have you considered text based questions versus email?

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Interesting. I actually found the existing AutoCat sufficient, once augmented with Tiller’s AI categorizer, which mostly gets things right. Before Tiller (and before AI), I had my script that would ask any not pattern-matched transaction to be categorized interactively. It was a hassle. But I did have a bunch of rules easily portable into Tiller’s AutoCat (more than 300). So I only get one or two transactions that AI has to handle. I wouldn’t want it to email this to me - I get enough emails :slight_smile:
I suppose this may work well for folks without ready rules, especially if it’s a hosted solution. Not many people would go through Docker, AWS, and OpenRouter.