Stop automatic category assignment/leave category blank for downloaded transactions (edited)

CodePoet

How can I stop the automatic category assignment? I would like to be able to manually assign categories to transactions and not have them be automatically assigned when new transactions are downloaded. I love the rule feature and would like that to be honored, but hate when the app tries to guess the category for a transaction since I don't notice when it gets it wrong sometimes which throws off my reporting. I would rather the category be blank and just let me create rules for things that recur.

Coach Natalie

Hello @CodePoet,

Thank you for taking the time to post your inquiry to the Community!

Simplifi is designed to automatically categorize your downloaded transactions using a combination of crowdsourcing, nearby payees, and simple logic, and there is no way to disable this, unfortunately.

With the exception of creating a Category Rule for every single Payee telling Simplifi to automatically assign the "Uncategorized" Category, another thing that you can try is to enable the 'Reviewed' column in your registers so that you can mark your transactions as "reviewed" as you do so; more details on this can be found here. Hopefully this option will help ensure that all of your transactions are getting the proper attention, and that Categories are being correctly assigned. 

I did also go ahead and turn this post into an Idea post requesting that Categories not be automatically assigned for downloaded transactions so that other Users can add their votes and our Product Team can review it. Please be sure to add your vote as well!

I hope this helps, but please let me know if you have any questions!

-Coach Natalie

Rkg

Having downloaded transactions that have not been categorized or reviewed be identified would be helpful. I guess you could filter by review status but a view that doesn’t require filter configuration would be nice. 

jmlma

I vote for this feature - not automatically assigning categories. It lets me review each transaction and think about the best category. The auto-assigned categories can be imprecise, or just plain wrong.

DannyB

Are you requesting this as an option that can be selected like opting into Early Access?  If so then I would add my vote if for no other reason then to support a fellow Simplifiers.  But I would not want this to be adopted as the universal default.

However, we already complete control over categorizing transactions even if Simplifi has already made it's best guess (which in my experience is spot on for all of my regular spending and pretty close to spot on for irregular spending). 

You can quickly review all your downloaded transactions by going to the Transactions (web) or All Transactions (Mobile) page where you can review each days freshly downloaded transactions for all accounts in one list.  Or you can select individual accounts to review just the transactions for that account.  On theses pages, you can review and select the category you want even if Simplifi has already assigned a category which in my mind is no different then changing "Uncategorized" to the category of your choosing.

The advantage to letting Simplifi auto assign categories is that you won't need to do anything for any correctly categorized transactions and any that are not you can change the category, which you will have to do anyway if it is left uncategorized.

ryan-2022-2022

I get frustrated when new transactions are automatically classified to the wrong class because of previous spending history.

If I go to Walmart today and buy groceries Simplifi will classify the expense as groceries, but if I go to Walmart to buy clothing the next day, and electronics the next day they will all be classified as groceries because of the autoclassification feature.

It would be helpful for me if I could review each incoming transaction by classifying them as unclassified, or needs review so that I can assign the correct category or split as I need. I try to keep my receipts to match up to the expenses in Simplifi but there are times that the receipt gets lost or I forget to update the transaction and it gets lumped into the wrong category.

It's really important that I track everything very closely and it would be extremely helpful if I could turn the feature off and assign one category to all new transactions.

thsourg

this is marked as “merged” but I don’t see the feature in the app. Does that mean that it was accepted and it will be on a following version? If not, I’d like to give a thumbs up on this. That feature is one of the things missing from my list of requirements before I replace YNAB with Simplifi  

Flopbot

@CodePoet,

One thing that I've done for payees like Amazon & Walmart - places where any number of categories might be used and I don't want them to be auto-categorized - I've done this at Simplifi > Settings > Payees & Rules.

Essentially, it does what you want, just on a case-by-case basis.





From your idea, I gather that you're really looking for more of a universal setting, but in the meantime, try this.

Two random notes that might be useful here:

1. It is much easier to adjust Payees & Rules on a desktop/laptop as opposed to on Mobile!
2. At one point, I had "None Set" for Amazon and it ended up causing weirdness with how Amazon was syncing.  While I haven't 100% ruled out other problems yet, I'm pretty sure that making this "Uncategorized" has fixed the issue.

Hope this helps.

Coach Natalie

Hello @thsourg,

To clarify, if you see "Merged" for a Community post, it means that two posts were merged into one. This occurs when someone posts an Idea or a topic that already exists in the Community; it has nothing to do with the status of the request. 

For the status of this request, if you navigate to the very top of this thread, you'll see that it's "Active", meaning that it has not been submitted to the Product Team for review, nor is it currently being considered. Once an update becomes available, we'll be sure to update this post accordingly. 

I hope this helps!

-Coach Natalie

Seth Malone

Please add an option to disable auto-categorization.  Personally, I would like my default category to be “Uncategorized” and create rules myself for automatic categorization of certain transactions.  However, I can see why some folks might like the feature as is, so it should just be an option to turn it off.  Thanks!

Seth Malone

@Flopbot - thanks for the suggestion about creating a rule for common multi-category payees (Amazon, Target, Walmart), and setting them to Uncategorized.  This will help a lot!