Payee Name wild cards for Transaction Rules [edited] (1 Merged Vote)
Classifying transactions with rules for Tags as well as using wildcards to define rules would increase the sophistication already built into Simplify. Please consider the following suggestions.
I love the fact that transactions can be categorized automatically with rules and I use this or rely on it tremendously. Major time saver in classifying transactions.
However, over time I have started to rely even more heavily on Tags in addition to Categories and I would love to be able to set rules for classifying transactions not only by Category but also by Tag for each Payee. For example, let's say Ralph's Supermarket is classified by a Category rule as Groceries, it would be even nicer if I could set a rule for a tag for Ralph's on that same rule record to set Tag of Food since I use Tags as a super-category to track a bunch of food-related Categories like Groceries, Eating Out, etc. A bigger reason for this is Tags make it easy to export transactions to Excel and analyze them with Pivot tables. Keeping classifications with just Categories would create a mess in Pivot tables since there are so many categories used. Using Tags allows for top-level or super-category leaving Categories and their subcategories for 2nd and 3rd layer classifications (I know, TMI here).Furthermore, I notice that many transactions have slight variations in the name of the same Payee. For example, United Airlines ticket purchases come in as United followed by a much of random numbers, like United 0167709377471 and United 0169972088414, etc. I would love to be able to configure rules with wildcards. For example, any Payee name that has United in the Payee name, change to United Airlines along with Category and Tag settings. I can show many examples of this if needed. A more sophisticated system would be a rule that says United with 13 random numbers would be classified in a certain way, like "United #############" rather than "United*" as the latter would misclassify another payee called United Valet or a payee name such as "...Travelagenunited State....".
Another issue I have noticed with Payees is sometimes there is a "Tst*" prefix added to the name and I'm not sure why this happens when previous or subsequent purchases with the same Payee exclude that prefix. Here again, the wildcard in the Payee Naming rule would help keep things in order and automate classifications further.
Anyway, so far Simplify is great. I hope you get to consider this suggestion important enough to put on the roadmap. Thanks.