AutoCat is Tiller's automatic categorization & transaction management engine. Rules allow you to define exactly how you want transactions categorized or modified and additional automation features for Google Sheets remove the requirement for using rules to keep your data consistently categorized.

Create rules on your AutoCat sheet to define how transactions should be categorized or modified using multiple criteria. Rules allow you to use advanced filtering criteria to apply changes to your Transactions such as filtering by transactions that occurred for a specific account, amounts, and more.

With Rules you can modify more than just the category for a transaction including cleaning up descriptions, applying notes and tags or modifying any column in your Transactions sheet. Rules only make changes to the Transactions sheet.

The Description Match feature is a separate toggle under your AutoCat Settings for Direct Fills Google Sheets. It’s a powerful feature that learns from your prior categorized data without you needing to create any AutoCat Rules.

If you categorize similar merchants consistently it will continue to use that category from your prior transaction history.

For example, if you most recently always categorized “Trader Joe’s” as groceries, it will continue to categorize those transactions as groceries without you needing to create a rule on the AutoCat sheet.

It eliminates the need for simple rules that are strictly based on the Description Contains criteria and should handle most of your categorization.

AI Suggest is a separate toggle under your AutoCat Settings for Direct Fills Google Sheets. It will pass your uncategorized transactions to an AI model and attempt to categorize them. AI Suggest is completely opt-in.

Auto Run on Fill allows AutoCat to run when data is being filled into your spreadsheet. When running on a fill AutoCat will use all features that are enabled when running. Turn on this feature to ensure that your data makes it to your spreadsheet already categorized.

Rules, Description Match, and AI Suggest work together to bring you the best, most customizable categorization engine available.

If you have AutoCat Rules configured on your AutoCat sheet those will always take priority. If a transaction matches an AutoCat Rule those changes will be applied and that’s it.

If you have both of these features on Description Match will try to apply categorizations first based on prior examples, and then AI Suggest will pass the remaining uncategorized transactions to an AI model to attempt to categorize.

Since Description Match & AI Suggest are separate features of AutoCat you can have either or both enabled. You may find the Description Match doesn’t work well for your use case and only want AI Suggest turned on or vice versa. You can also opt to turn both of those off and only use Rules.

You can easily get more insight into which AutoCat feature categorized a transaction by reviewing the Categorized By column. In newer versions of the Foundation Template this column is a default column out right in the Transactions sheet. If you don’t see the Categorized By column you can simply add it to your Transactions sheet by inserting a column next to another text based column and it will fill going forward.

The Categorized By column will fill when AutoCat runs and note which process categorized the transaction: Rules, Description Match, or AI Suggest. This can help you better understand which AutoCat feature is doing the most work for you.

Click the “Run AutoCat” button in the Tiller Money Feeds sidebar or if you're using a Direct Fills Google Sheet you can also run AutoCat from the Tiller Console.

You can run your rules against your entire transactions sheet including all categorized transactions if you need to re-categorize. Click the dropdown next to "Run AutoCat" in the sidebar or the Console to access the Run Rules on All.

If you choose to have it run on all transactions (including those that are already categorized) this will overwrite existing categorizations where a rule matches so use this feature carefully.

When using Run Rules on All option AutoCat will ONLY run your configured rules against the entire dataset. AI Suggest & Description Match will not run at all during the Run Rules on All.

Turn on the Auto Run on Fill setting to have AutoCat automatically categorize transactions as they're added to your Transactions sheet. Turn on this setting under AutoCat Settings via the gear icon next to AutoCat in the Tiller Money Feeds sidebar or from the Settings section for your spreadsheet on the Tiller Console.

The automatic processing only works for newly added transactions. It will not automatically categorize transactions that were already in the sheet on the next sheet update. You can manually run AutoCat to categorize those transactions that already exist in your sheet.

The AutoCat sheet is currently required in order for AutoCat to run, even if you don't want to use rules for categorization.

The AutoCat sheet is included by default in most Google Sheets. If you don’t find the tab along the bottom you can add it using the steps below.

You can build rules right in the AutoCat sheet or use the Rule Builder feature in the Tiller Money Feeds sidebar.

A rule consists of filtering criteria and overrides. The filter criteria determines if the transaction matches the rule (if the transaction Description contains the word "Costco") and what override should be applied (then set the category to "Groceries"). A rule can have more than one filtering criteria and more than one override. Read more about filtering & overrides.

Rules can be simple or advanced. Simple rules are those that only have Description Contains as a filter criteria and only apply a category override. Advanced Rules may have multiple criteria that transaction needs to match in order for the rule's overrides to be applied.

The rules are processed in a top down order, so put your most fine grained (specific) rules at the top of the sheet and broader (generic) rules lower down.

You can sort the AutoCat sheet if you turn the filter on in the sheet (turn on the filter for the entire sheet, not just a single column) or drag and drop rows to rearrange the order of your rules.

The AutoCat Rule Builder allows you to build rules from the Tiller Money Feeds sidebar while you’re reviewing transactions. It’s a convenient way to build rules so you don’t have to flip back and forth between the Transactions sheet and AutoCat sheet.

If you haven’t already, install Tiller Money Feeds to access the AutoCat features from a convenient sidebar right in your spreadsheet. Note that the Rule Builder features are only available in the Tiller Money Feeds sidebar.

With the Simple option selected in the Rule Builder type a keyword into the “When Description contains” field in the sidebar and assign a category. You can also select one or more rows in your Transactions sheet and use the “Rule from Selection” option to pre-populate the Description Contains field.

Click “Create rule” or “Create & Run” if you’d like to go ahead and run AutoCat against all your rules. Rules created using the Rule Builder are added to the bottom of your AutoCat sheet. You may need to rearrange rules to ensure the proper processing order.

This option is only available when making Simple rules.

The Rules from Past 90 days option will scan your transactions sheet and find similar transactions from the last 90 days and suggest description contains criteria for those transactions.

This feature works best if you modify the Description Contains fields to be more generic (e.g. removing store numbers and locations) and remove duplicate entries where there slight variations in the description after the suggested rules are generated.

This feature does not have awareness of rules that you may already have in your AutoCat sheet so if you run it more than once you may end up with duplicate rules on your AutoCat sheet if you accept the suggested rules.

Most of the time a simple “Description Contains” filter will work for a basic rule set to capture recurring transactions and those with a description that are always categorized the same. Note that for Google Sheets, these rules are no longer necessary if you enable the Description Match feature and are consistent about past categorizations.

Choose a Category from the dropdown, enter “Description Contains” keyword(s) into that column in the ruleset and you have a basic rule. 

Run AutoCat via the Tiller Money Feeds add-on sidebar > AutoCat

Example rule:
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Apply “Yoga” to all transactions where the Description Contains “asheville Commuussq” for example.

This would categorize any transaction that contains that text in the description as “Yoga.”

The filter criteria (Description Contains) is case insensitive, but it is literally a contains. So if you have a rule that just has the criteria for Description contains as “air” - perhaps for “Allegiant air" any other description that contains the word “air,” including in the middle of a word, would get categorized under that rule. So slightly more detailed/specific is better.

You can also use the Account Contains and Institution Contains in a similar manner to drill down even further.

Use the amount min and amount max columns to set the minimum and maximum for the amount that the rule should look for. Enter these as absolute values.

AutoCat allows you to build rules to override and automate data customization in other columns in the Transactions sheet beyond just the Category column.

For example, if you wanted to apply a Tag in a Tags column in the Transactions sheet based on content in the Description column (or any other column in the Transactions sheet) you could build a rule to do this.

You can use the AutoCat sidebar to easily build advanced rules by toggling on the Advanced Rule Builder. This is a quick and easy way to add column overrides to your AutoCat sheet and do more than just categorize with AutoCat.

A quick explainer on some of these concepts and how to build a rule to clean up descriptions (note this is an old video and the UI no longer looks like what's depicted, newer videos coming soon!):

In the AutoCat rules sheet, each column performs one of two functions:

In our basic rule below the Description Contains column is the "Filter Criteria" and the Category column in the Transactions sheet is the column that will be overridden with the content I selected in the Category column on the AutoCat rules sheet. 

Note: AutoCat does not process rules for columns formatted as a Date in the Transactions sheet.

Filter criteria columns in the rules sheet determine if a transaction should be processed. (i.e. does the Transaction meet this criteria?)

A column is recognized as a filter criteria when it has a filter criteria suffix. (e.g. contains, equals, starts with, ends with) The full list of suffix options are below.

Filter criteria are AND-ed together— for a transaction to be processed, it must meet all non-blank rules.

Filter criteria columns must start with the column name to be searched. For example, “Description Contains” will search the column named “Description.” If a column does not exist in the Transactions sheet, the filter criteria is ignored. This is case sensitive. Make sure the first word in the criteria is capitalized. (i.e "Description contains" NOT "description contains")

Any Transactions-sheet column name can be used for a filter criteria. This includes custom columns you add that are not default in the Transactions sheet. Great examples are Tags, Note, or Client.

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

If you'd like to have one of your AutoCat rules search based on the polarity of the Amount column (positive or negative amounts) you can add an Amount Polarity column to your AutoCat sheet. Otherwise the Amount Min and Amount Max columns that are default columns in the AutoCat sheet are expecting absolute values.

If you want AutoCat to look for negative amounts (expenses or outflows) put the word "Negative" (without quotes) in the Amount Polarity column for that rule. If you want it to look for positive amounts (inflows, income, or refunds) put the word "Positive" (without quotes) in the Amount Polarity column for that rule.

AutoCat supports multiple match criteria in text filter criteria fields.

For example, a “Description Contains” rule can be:

Multiple match criteria are OR-ed. In other words, the rule will be applied if the row matches just one of the keywords in the list for the rule.

Each multiple-match criteria keyword must be wrapped in quotes and separated by commas. 

AutoCat can also handle regular expressions. The use of regex in AutoCat rules is supported in the Tiller Community. Learn more about using Regex with AutoCat here.

Add a column name and append the Regex suffix to it to build rules using regular expressions. E.g. the column in the AutoCat sheet would be "Description Regex" or "Account Regex" (no quotes).

Examples of terms here: https://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/notes/regex/ 8

You can delete rows and add columns to the AutoCat sheet. You can also freeze the top row.

Override columns are any columns in the AutoCat rules sheet that are not recognized as filter criteria (i.e. they do not have a suffix). If a transaction matches on the rule's filter criteria, the values in any override columns for the rule will be applied to those columns in the matching rows on the Transactions sheet. 

The first version of AutoCat only recognized Category column overrides. With AutoCat, any Transactions sheet column name can be used for an override. 

For example, if we had a rule with “Description Contains” = “Starbucks” and “Description” = “Starbucks”

The transaction:

Would be updated after AutoCat runs with:

This feature is great if you want to clean up your descriptions. You can use a single rule to clean up descriptions and categorize. In the basic rule example above all Starbucks transactions would be categorized as Coffee and the descriptions would be unified to just say "Starbucks" instead of including the extra details about which specific Starbucks store it was.

It's important to note that once a transaction matches on one rule, it won't match on other rules so if you want to clean up or customize other columns you would exclude those entries from multiple match criteria rules. E.g. if you put Starbucks in a multi-match rule for "coffee" you won't be able to clean the descriptions up for Starbucks. 

By default override columns other than Category are not included in the AutoCat ruleset sheet. If you want to build additional override rules for Description, other default Transactions sheet columns, or your own columns (see next section) you need to manually add these columns to the AutoCat ruleset sheet by inserting columns (right click a column to insert).

Custom columns you add to the Transactions sheet can also be used for override rules in the AutoCat sheet.

For example, if you added a column called “Tags” to your transaction sheet you can build an override rule to automatically tag transactions by adding that column and the criteria to the AutoCat sheet.

Using the steps below categories that were applied by AI Suggest and where a review/checkbox column is blank will be highlighted. When you've confirmed or modified the AI Suggest category check the box to remove the highlights.

=AND($Q2="AI Suggest", $A2=FALSE)

If you want it to skip a merchant because AI Suggest or Description Match unlikely to get right, like Amazon purchases, we recommend adding a category for "Categorize Later" or "Skip" then create an AutoCat rule for that merchant using the Description Contains column.

If your Google Sheets is powered by Direct Fills these are some limitations with AutoCat. Each transaction must have a unique Transaction ID.