Introducing Description Match & AI Suggest for AutoCat in Google Sheets

News from Tiller
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Categorization is mission critical to getting value from Tiller. It’s how you understand your money, keep things tidy, and answer questions like whether you’re on track with your budget, where you can cut back, or why there was an overage last month. AutoCat Rules give you the most control over how your data is categorized, but building rules can be time consuming Today, we’re introducing two new AutoCat features for Google Sheets that make categorization easier while keeping you in control.

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Description Match

Description Match is now its own standalone feature. It learns from your existing categorized transactions and automatically applies the right category based on prior examples of that transaction, no rules needed. For example, if you’ve consistently categorized Trader Joe’s as Groceries, it’ll keep doing that. This covers the majority of everyday categorization without requiring any rules or AI involvement.

AI Suggest

We’re also officially releasing AI Suggest out of beta. When turned on, it passes any remaining uncategorized transactions to an AI model to categorize based on your history and category list. It’s completely opt-in. If you’d prefer your data never touch an LLM, you can leave it toggled off and use Description Match or AutoCat Rules instead.

How it works

When you run AutoCat, the features work in priority order:

  1. AutoCat Rules run first and always take precedence.
  2. Description Match catches what’s left, using your past categorizations.
  3. AI Suggest, if you’ve switched it on, handles anything still left uncategorized.

Here’s how the three compare:

Feature Uses AI? Setup Required Best for
AutoCat Rules No Yes, rule creation Full, precise control
Description Match No Just categorize a few examples Repeat transactions
AI Suggest Yes Toggle on Unfamiliar transactions

One important change

With this release we’re making AI Suggest & Description Match available only for Google Sheets powered by Direct Fills. That means if you’re still using a Sidebar Fills sheet you’ll no longer be able to use AI Suggest in that spreadsheet. You can upgrade your Sidebar Fills sheet to Direct Fills to resume using AI Suggest, and get access to the Description Match feature.

Not sure what Direct Fills are? They’re the new faster, more reliable, automatic way to get your bank transactions and balances into your Google Sheets. After an institution refreshes data just fills, automatically. No more opening a sidebar and clicking fill or waiting for a timed Auto Fill.

You can read more about Direct Fills vs Sidebar Fills in our Help Center.

Chime in with questions or feedback below!

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WHY always Google Sheets and not EXCEL??

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For me, the critical missing piece is the ability to understand and review what has been automatically categorized.

Right now, there is no differentiation between a category I have personally selected and one that was automatically inserted which may be incorrect.

In accounting software such as QuickBooks, transactions can be categorized automatically but category status is listed as pending until a user approves them.

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From my experience with Tiller, they roll things out in Google Sheets first, make sure it’s working as intended, fix the bugs, and then add the feature to Excel as well. From a development perspective, I think it makes sense.

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Great work Tiller team on the enhancements to AutoCat. These two new features look to be very useful for categorizing the transactions with additional levels of priority.

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This is a great addition to autocat, I’m excited to try it out!

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I’ve never used AutoCat. Not because I don’t think it’s a useful tool, I do, but for my workflow, categorizing is how I know I don’t miss any transactions. I have a conditional formatting rule that highlights yellow any cell in the Category column that is blank. That is my signal that the transaction is new, so I go in and manually give it a category, clean up the description, add any notes or tags, and then I’m done. But I mostly use Tiller as a way to monitor money going in and out of my accounts, and not so much as a budgeting tool.

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@daveahlers Dave, the pending category status is a great suggestion!

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Great question here @daveahlers - I’d recommend this workflow to add a review column. It’s what I personally use to check AI Suggest’s work: How to use AutoCat for automatic categorization | Tiller Help Center

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@chrisgp123 Chris, the way you categorize your transactions is great. I like your use of conditional formatting too. It gives you complete control and helps to gain a good insight of your data. Using AutoCat really requires having that good understanding first.

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Having been through this a few times, here’s my suggestion.

Maybe for some purposes you want few categories and for others you want lots of categories.

Food

Eating out / eating in

Eating out at restauraunt / Eating out at work / Eating out on vacation / eating out on business trip

You might need one view for taxes and another for budget.

2 or 1000 different categories for different purposes.

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This is great, except I use Amazon for a lot of different purchases and I don’t want it to autocat Amazon as the last thing I manually categorized every time.

Is there a way to have Autocat ignore a description or do a “not like” instead of just matching? Maybe I can do that with regex.

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Sure @Marc_R you can create an exclusion rule on the AutoCat sheet to prevent it from categorizing, but you do have to give it some sort of placeholder category.

Here’s more guidance on the help center: How to use AutoCat for automatic categorization | Tiller Help Center

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perfect, thanks so much!

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I am glad I have PowerShell doing that for me and don’t have to wait for the second class citizen Excel to get it.

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Hi, I used AI suggest AutoCat and my monthly actual totals are not showing yet AI did categorize the transactions correctly.

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Welcome @kbd4 ! :waving_hand:

I’d recommend reaching out to our support team via chat on the Tiller Console at https://my.tiller.com for help with this. It doesn’t sound like it’s specific to AutoCat and possibly some edits were made in areas that are view only that could be causing the issue with your totals not showing correctly.

@john.kavanagh I’m curious to learn more about your Excel solution. Are you saying that you’ve got Powershell doing the AI categorization / Description Match work? Or just that it’s like AutoCat?

We have AutoCat for Excel so you can build out rules, both simple or advanced, just the same as Google Sheets, we just don’t have the AI / Description Match feature available yet.

It’s not at all that Excel is “second class” it’s just faster for us to build and validate for Google Sheets. By the time it gets to Excel we’ve already worked out most of the bugs and made all the improvements/enhancements based on feedback from the Google Sheets cohort, so you could think of it as saving the best for last :wink:

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@chrisgp123 I was in this boat for a long time too. I think there is real power in touching each transaction. I believe this is how you really get to know your money, and from my perspective gain the most control. But when I created a new sheet for 2026 (after using the same sheet for about 5 years) I hooked up AI Suggest (and now Description Match) plus this Review Column and I still get to touch each transaction (by checking it off in the review column) but the work of selecting the category is done. So it’s kind of the best of both worlds. :white_check_mark:

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I use PowerShell and the ImportExcel module to handle some enhanced AutoCat and while I am not ready to open things up to AI I have applied some claude within my PowerShell access to my tiller file, nothing to write home about.

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How does this change the data handling of individual’s data by Tiller? Does this run locally or on Tiller’s servers? Thank you.