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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.

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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:

It is much easier to adjust Payees & Rules on a desktop/laptop as opposed to on Mobile!
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!

mbirkey

I vote for having the option to bring downloaded transactions in as Uncategorized.

UrsulaA

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/23741#Comment_23741

Same vote for me.

EL1234

I have rules to categorize amazon, walmart… as Shopping, which I use as a placeholder until I modify the category to be more specific. I also mark transactions as Reviewed when they have the correct category, and every day or so I filter by Not Reviewed and see what needs to be modified.

BlueHouse

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/25563#Comment_25563

I vote for this as well. My experience with auto-categorization has been poor.

I see no evidence that it "learns" when I correct transactions. I have been correcting fuel purchases from BP that auto-categorize as "clothing" since I signed up. I finally set up a rule that will hopefully fix this, but I had hoped that this is something that it would correct on its own.

Also, every check transaction (yes, people still use checks) imported from my bank shows the payee as "Check #nnnn" (where nnnn is the check number) which makes payee rules impossible because there seems to be no way to use wild-cards in the payee field. The auto-categorization sets every "Check" transaction as a mortgage payment. Once again, there seems to be no way to teach it otherwise.

In my experience, Mint, which I used before, was bad at categorizing transactions, but it was free, so that was tolerable. I'm going to hold a paid product to higher standards.

DakotaDad

A feature I enjoy on YNAB is new transactions are <b>bold</b> allowing easy ident of new transactions needing review. Personally I don't want to have to enable another column to include the <i>reviewed</i> flag. Admittedly I haven't tried it yet, but it doesn't sound appealing to me.

EL1234

I've been using the Reviewed column for a couple of years and like it a lot. It takes up very little space, just the width of a checkmark. If you haven't tried it yet, I'd recommend trying it just to see, maybe you will like it!

Trevor

I feel like the Reviewed status should just behave more like the Exclude From Spending Plan/Reports icons. That's how it works on mobile and it barely takes up any space, plus has the advantage of showing up in the spending plan and other views as well.

The fact that it's basically hidden on web but shows up everywhere and can't be disabled on mobile seems a bit odd.

User0123

At a minimum, it would be helpful to quickly know when looking at the list of transactions whether the Categorization was set by Me, a Rule I created, or Simplifi's "Ai"

Cosmo24

I vote to also have transactions NOT automatically categorized. I can create my own rules and modify once a week or month. Most of my transactions already have a rule in place. Automatically categorizing a transactions may cause me to miss something. I would rather it show as 'needs reviewed' or 'uncategorized' so it will draw my attention to it.

barncrow

There's no reason this wouldn't be a simple on/off option…unless Quicken benefits from having us all use it: some kind of AI training perhaps, or the harvesting/sale of data?

Satch

Add my vote for this feature, only rather than a blank category, it should be set to the 'Uncategorized' category, which is a native category (not custom). Further, it should be an OPTION to enable/disable automatic category assignments for unknown payees (ones that do not have a rule already assigned).

I have to agree with others above that the automatic assignments in Simplifi are horribly unreliable if not comical, like many crowd sourced databases. A far better algorithm would be something like Google Maps does, where data are crowd sourced but verified by system admins or other humans qualified to vet the data.