This feature is only available for Google Sheets at this time.
👂 If you have questions or feedback about how to make this feature better or more useful to you please write to beta@tiller.com. We'd love to hear your feedback! 💙
Easily get started with your transaction categorization using AI Suggest for AutoCat. Have your transaction data intelligently categorized in seconds.
How to Use AutoCat with AI Suggest (Beta)
This is our recommended workflow for using AI Suggest (Beta) with AutoCat.
If you're brand new to Tiller, double check the Categories sheet to make sure the default categories make sense for your financial life and make any edits directly to the categories or add new ones to the bottom of the list.
Categorize a few examples so AutoCat can learn your patterns. We recommend categorizing a few recurring expenses like your rent or mortgage, utilities, favorite grocery store and things like that. You don't need to categorize all the data, just a few examples from the last month for a few different places you shop.
Confirm that AI Suggest is turned on in the AutoCat settings section. If you'd like to add a review column to confirm AI Suggest's work, check out these steps.
Click "Run AutoCat" in the main Tiller Money Feeds sidebar to categorize your transactions.
You can always run it with the default categories to see how it works and then refine your categories later.
The AI Suggest feature only works when running AutoCat manually by clicking the Run AutoCat button right now. It does not run when the AutoCat process runs on fill at this time.
If there are things it doesn't get quite right, add explicit AutoCat rules on the AutoCat sheet so you can categorize just the way you want. Your rules will always take precedence over AI Suggest's recommendation.
Add a review column
If you'd like to be able to more easily see and review the categorizations that AI Suggest is making you can add a review column. This will help you see what was categorized specifically by AI Suggest and confirm or change categories as needed.
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.
Add a checkbox to column A (if it's still blank and not being used for another purpose) otherwise add a new column and title it "Review" (or whatever you'd like to call it). Add a checkbox to a cell from the Insert menu. Make sure that the checkbox is present in all rows in the column.
Confirm the column letter location of the Categorized By column, the default column letter is column Q.
Select the Category column in your Transactions sheet by the header letter, usually column D.
Open the Format menu and choose the "Conditional formatting" option
Modify the Range to start with row 2 rather than row 1. So D2 instead of D1 if your category is column D.
Change the format rules to be "Custom formula is"
Input the following formula and modify as needed based on your column order. This formula assumes Categorized By (where the text "AI Suggest" would be) is in column Q and that the checkbox (which would be FALSE/empty) is in column A.
Choose your preferred highlight color.
=AND($Q2="AI Suggest", $A2=FALSE)
Create an exclusion rule
If you want it to skip a merchant because it's 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.
This feature is still in beta. There may be bugs, odd behavior, or timeouts. If you find a bug or have a question, write to beta@tillerhq.com. See our known bugs and limitations section below.
The experimental workflow applies categories to the Category column. If unexpected/undesired changes are made, use the Google Sheets version history to restore to a prior version.
Turning on AI Suggest
AI Suggest may be turned on for you by default. To double check or turn it on follow these steps.
Open your Google Sheet and launch Tiller Money Feeds from the Extensions menu at the top of your Google Sheet.
Open the AutoCat Settings section by clicking the gear icon next to AutoCat in the sidebar. Be sure to keep the "only uncategorized" option selected, we have not tested how this would work when you choose "ALL"
Toggle on the AI Suggest option. Note that at this time the AI Suggest feature does not run on fill if you have Auto Run on Fill enabled, it will only run when manually running AutoCat.
How it works
You don't have to use AI Suggest. If turned off you can still use AutoCat rules to automatically categorize transactions.
When enabled, AI Suggest will attempt to categorize the remaining uncategorized transactions after your AutoCat rules have been processed. AutoCat rules will always take precedence if you have them.
After AutoCat finishes categorizing based on your rules, AI Suggest will take over and try to categorize anything that didn't have a rule match. It will first try to match the full description of the transaction against prior matching transactions with the same full description. Please note that full description is a separate column out right in the Transactions sheet, distinct from the Description column.
If there is no prior matching transactions based on full description, or prior matching transactions have different categories applied, it will attempt to categorize using an LLM.
If the LLM isn't confident about what category to use, it will leave the category blank.
If you want more details about how the AI Suggest process works, feel free to write to beta@tillerhq.com. You can also add a Categorization Notes column to your Transactions sheet to see which stage of the process tried to categorize the transaction. This column will not fill retroactively and will only populate for newly categorized transactions after it was added.
How to clean up categories after using AI Suggest (Beta)
If you started with the default categories and ran AutoCat after getting started and have changed your mind about your categories and want to clean things up use these steps:
Customize your categories on the Categories sheet. See our tips here.
Navigate to the Transactions sheet and turn on the filter. Steps are here.
Filter on the Category column to show only categories you've removed or changed one at a time.
Option 1: clear out the Category column for these transactions and click "Run AutoCat" to have AutoCat with AI Suggest enabled try again or categorize a few examples then Run AutoCat to make sure it has some "training" examples for a higher chance it will get it right.
Option 2: categorize one then use the fill handle to update the instances below the first one that will use the same category. Repeat as needed for different categories.
Known Bugs & Limitations
If you find a bug or issue write to beta@tillerhq.com.
It does not run on the Auto Run on Fill process, it can only be run by manually clicking "Run AutoCat"
If you have any invalid categories (Categories being used in the Category column on the Transactions sheet that do not also exist on the Categories sheet, noted with a red triangle in the upper right corner of the Category cell on the Transactionssheet) it will fail during the AI Suggest process.
AI Suggest will not run when the ALL Transactions option is selected from the AutoCat settings screen since it can only process transactions that are uncategorized.
Sometimes the process can crash and the sidebar doesn't gracefully handle the crash so it gets stuck in the "Categorizing transactions" state. If it's running for more than 20+ minutes, it likely crashed and you should close the sidebar and try again later.
It is unlikely to work when trying to categorize very large datasets (e.g. 20K+ transactions). We don't know the explicit maximum number of transactions it can attempt to categorize but 20K is definitely too many right now.