Possible to add text to a custom column in Transactions sheet with AutoCat?

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Hi. I’ve added a “Vendor” column to the right of TM columns in Transactions sheet. I was hoping to use AutoCat to categorize a new entry and also add text in my “Vendor” column to the right. However what AutoCat does is create a “vendor” column in the AutoCat sheet instead and updates that column when AutoCat is run. My “Vendor” column is never updated when I run auto-cat. I’ve added a screenshot of the rule I’ve setup to add a category and vendor but that’s not what’s happening. Is there anyway to use AutoCat to update custom columns in the Transactions sheet? Thanks in advance for any insight on this :slight_smile: ps: great software by the way!

Marco's pizza autocat
Marco's pizza autocat642×1110 43.1 KB

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Solved :wink: had a snooze and went back to look at the problem. The issue was I had a conflicting AutoCat rule that automatically marked any Description that had the word “pizza” as a restaurant so it was never making it to my test entry later. So in AutoCat I cleaned up the conflicting rule so that there was only one entry that referrenced pizza and it worked. On the AutoCat tab (as in my original photo) had a Category and Vendor columns filled out. Then I deleted the cateogry for this entry under Transactions and ran AutoCat again. This time it correctly filled Category and Vendor (my custom vendor column) in the Transactions tab. It’s important that your custom columns DO NOT have the same name as any Tiller columns in Transactions tab (I assume this is the case throughout Tiller) and if you’re having issues with AutoCat, make sure you don’t have conflicting rules above.

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@dp007, Thanks for sharing that you found the solution. I bet a lot of people didn’t know you could update columns using AutoCat so thank you for sharing that excellent tip.

-Alice
Tiller Evangelist

Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn

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@dp007 sorry to jump in here, but I also recently wanted to add a “Vendor”-like column to the Transactions sheet and found something that might be useful to you. Tiller has an optional column named “Merchant Name” that, when added to your Transactions spreadsheet, will be filled in by Tiller with a normalized merchant name (at least for popular merchants). There’s more information in Tiller’s docs. I even use AutoCat to set my own Merchant Name value for some transactions, which correctly overrides whatever is provided by Tiller.

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Thanks Alice. Tiller’s a pretty powerful tool. Can’t wait to see all the ways it can help us get a better grip on our finances. And hope that tip helps somone else too :wink:

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