Use this guide to help troubleshoot common AutoCat issues. If you're having an issue with AutoCat that is not documented here or the steps don't help use the chat in the lower right corner to write to our team and let us know.
AI Suggest is disabled
AI Suggest is only available for Direct Fills sheets. If you're using a Sidebar Fills sheet AI Suggest is no longer available in these sheets. Upgrade your sheet to Direct Fills to resume access to AI Suggest.
AutoCat isn't categorizing or modifying a transaction as expected
If you notice AutoCat not categorizing or modifying transactions as you'd expect check out these tips:
If you're using a Direct Fills sheet, a unique Transaction ID is required in order to apply changes to a transaction. Any transactions that are missing the Transaction ID or have duplicate IDs will be ignored in the processing and changes from matching rules will not be applied.
AutoCat categorizes transactions in a top down order. If a rule higher in your rules list runs on a transaction first (including rules that don't apply a category) subsequent rules will not be run (e.g. if there is a rule higher in the list that applies a cleaner description but no category and a lower rule that applies a category, the category rule will not run).
Double check that the transaction matches the criteria and that AutoCat should really be categorizing it if it's uncategorized and not matching on another rule.
Check for conflicting or duplicate rules in your list that might interfere with proper rule execution and categorization
The amount column must be formatted as USD currency. Other currency formats are not supported and AutoCat rules may not work as expected.
Rules are using an unsupported filter criteria suffix in Direct Fills sheets. These suffixes are not currently supported in Direct Fills sheets. If you upgraded your sheet to Direct Fills and your AutoCat rules are no longer working, review your AutoCat sheet for columns using these suffixes and remove those columns.
“Equals” (e.g. Amount Equals)
"Starts With” (e.g. Description Starts With)
“Ends With” (e.g. Description Ends With)
Your sheet is using Sidebar Fills and you've only been using AI Suggest. Since AI Suggest is no longer supported for Sidebar Fills sheets, if you don't have rules configured, AutoCat won't categorize anything. Upgrade your sheet to Direct Fills to resume using AutoCat.
I am missing a category in the AutoCat sheet Category dropdown
Most likely your data validation rule for the dropdown in the Category column on your AutoCat sheet needs to be corrected. Follow the steps in this guide to correct the issue on the AutoCat sheet.
Note the steps reference the Transactions sheet, but the same basic steps will fix the same issue in the AutoCat sheet.
After I click "Run AutoCat" the process never finishes
If you're using AI Suggest with AutoCat this process can take a long time especially if you're trying to use AI Suggest to categorize a large dataset.
Otherwise, the process may have failed. Reach out to our support team for help if it seems to be stuck on the rules processing.
I see a "No rules present in AutoCat sheet" error
After opening the AutoCat sidebar you see a "no rules present in AutoCat sheet" error at the top.
Make sure that your AutoCat sheet header row (the blue one) is in row 1
Make sure the header row has both "Category" and "Description contains" (without the quotes) in the AutoCat sheet - usually this is in cell A1 and B1 - AutoCat won't recognize there are rules without the Category or Description Contains columns
I'm seeing errors in the sidebar after running AutoCat in the Tiller Money Feeds add-on
Your sheet is NOT sorted newest to oldest AND you have a filter turned on for one of the columns that is filtering out an invalid category (i.e. a category that does not exist on your Categories sheet).
To fix:
Select all the data in your sheet and turn off the filter
Sort your sheet from newest to oldest (Z>A) by the Date column
Re-run AutoCat
I see a "Transactions Sheet Required" error
After opening the AutoCat sidebar you see a "Transactions Sheet Required" error.
Make sure you haven't renamed or removed your Transactions sheet
I see "Date string missing timezone"
Try resetting your time zone settings in Google Sheets by re-selecting what's there. Also double check that you don't have any duplicated date or date-related columns such as "Date" , "Month" , "Week" and so on, on the Transactions sheet. If it's still failing contact the support team via chat for more help.
I see "Unexpected API request format error"
The "Unexpected Sheets API" error you're seeing when running AutoCat manually is a known issue affecting Direct Fills sheets with large datasets (lots of rows and/or columns).
Because AutoCat for Direct Fills sends your entire Transactions sheet to the backend for processing, even if you're only trying to categorize a few rows, the request can time out when running against very large datasets.
Auto Run on Fill is not affected by this because it's processing the uncategorized data as it's being filled.
For now, two things can help:
Lean on Auto Run on Fill instead of manual runs, since it isn't affected. (Turn it on from the AutoCat Settings if it's not already on).
If you do need to run manual AutoCat, I'd recommend reducing your Transactions sheet size to the most recent few years (e.g., archiving older transactions to a separate tab).
Our team has this logged as a bug, but I don't have an ETA on a fix so there isn't more we can do here other than the recommendations noted above.