How auto-categorising works

When transactions come in, Budget Smugglers tries to file each one in a category. It runs when you import a statement, when the Sync extension brings new ones in, when you add a transaction by hand, and when you choose Re-run categorisation.

What it never touches#

• Anything you categorised by hand.
• Transfers between your own accounts. Those are paired up and filed under Transfers (see transfers).
• Super, assets and share portfolios, which aren’t spending.
• Accounts you can only read.

The order it tries#

For each transaction, the first of these that has an answer wins:

1. Your rules, in the order listed on the Rules page. See rules.
2. Merchants you’ve filed before. Each time you pick a category by hand, Budget Smugglers remembers it for that merchant. “ALDI STORES ROBINA” and “Purchase At ALDI Mudgeeraba QLD” both count as ALDI.
3. Similar merchants. If your past transactions from merchants with the same main name nearly all sit in one category, it uses that one.
4. Merchants we know. A curated list of well-known merchants and where they usually go.
5. Your bank’s category. Some banks send their own category with each transaction. Common ones are matched to yours.
6. AI, if the pool has it switched on. See below.

If nothing fits, the transaction stays uncategorised. A blank is better than a wrong guess.

Open a transaction to see how its category was set, like “by a rule” or “you’ve filed this merchant here before”.

Teaching it#

The fastest way to get better results is to categorise a few things yourself.

• Pick a category in the transactions list. That merchant is remembered.
• Choose Apply to similar in the message that pops up to file the rest from that merchant.
• Choose Create a rule when you want to be explicit, or need to match on amount, account or direction.

To sort out a backlog, tick Uncategorised only on the Transactions page. Added some rules lately? Re-run categorisation runs everything above again over all transactions that weren’t set by hand.

AI categorisation#

AI is the last step. It only sees merchants that rules, your history, the known-merchants list and the bank’s category couldn’t place. It’s off until the pool turns it on.

Turning it on#

Only the pool’s owner and admins can change pool settings. It applies to the whole pool.

What is sent#

The merchants go to Anthropic’s Claude, grouped so each merchant is asked about once. For each one, only this is sent:

• The payee, or the bank description if there’s no payee (cut to 120 characters).
• Whether the money went in or out.
• A rough amount, in whole dollars with no cents.

Your list of category names goes with them, so it can pick one.

Nothing else is sent. No account names or numbers, balances, dates, notes, people, or anything that identifies you or the pool.

Every transaction from that merchant gets the category it picks. If it isn’t reasonably sure, it leaves the merchant uncategorised. Transactions it filed show “suggested by AI” in their details. Change any of them and your choice is remembered as usual.

Categorising with your AI assistant#

You can also connect Claude, ChatGPT or another assistant to Budget Smugglers and ask it to sort out what’s left. It works through your uncategorised transactions one merchant at a time, busiest first, and suggests a category for each. You say yes, and Budget Smugglers remembers each merchant, the same as when you pick one by hand. It can make rules for the ones that keep turning up.

This runs on your own assistant, so you see every suggestion before it’s applied. See AI assistants to connect one.