MoneyWiz is designed to categorize transactions coming from online banking automatically, but it may require some help from you.
There are several sources where MoneyWiz is trying to get information about what the proper category of a transaction should be, and in this topic we will discuss the most popular ones.
To begin using these features effectively, you need to enable settings for automatic categorization and auto-detection in the account settings under Edit → Advanced settings.
Category from Online Banking Provider
Some providers have their own private algorithms for trying to detect the category of every transactions. With some banks, especially in the United States, they do better; with some banks it’s not so great. With this source MoneyWiz does not expect you to do anything – it just takes the category from the service provider and converts it to a MoneyWiz category. If you don’t already have this category, MoneyWiz will automatically create one for you.
It is important to note that in most cases, MoneyWiz only receives basic data from banks, including Date, Amount, and Description, and relies on the Description field for categorization.
To prevent this, you can adjust settings by navigating to your account's Extended settings, where you can disable options like "Auto-create new categories," "Auto-categorize transactions," and "Auto-create new payees."
This may be annoying if MoneyWiz is constantly creating for you categories that are needed. If you want you can disable automatic creation of new categories by editing your account and changing the Extended settings.
Category from payee
You may already be aware that MoneyWiz is able to learn how you categorize transactions based on your descriptions and payees. This is valid for manually created transactions as well. So if you go to Starbucks, when creating a transaction if you select the Starbucks payee, MoneyWiz automatically pre-fills your category with the category you usually use with this payee. The same is valid for transactions downloaded from online banking.
The system typically improves its accuracy after approximately three edits to transactions with similar descriptions or payees, allowing it to better learn your categorization patterns.
So make sure that:
your list of payees is clean and tidy, meaning there are no duplicates with different spelling and no unused payees, especially if they have weird numbers.
when a transaction is downloaded with a correct payee and wrong category, do edit the transaction selecting the proper category and do not delete the payee, as MoneyWiz will use it the next time you shop at this place.
You can use the Bulk Edit feature to quickly assign categories or update payees across multiple transactions. Additionally, consider using the Payee linking feature, found under Settings → Payees → Payee linked names, to merge variations of the same payee and keep your payee list clean.
Note, that is it not sufficient to just have the payee in your list of payees. That will help MoneyWiz match the payee, indeed. But if you need MoneyWiz to recognize the category, you will have to have an existing transaction with proper payee and category, so MoneyWiz can read from it. For this reason, it’s common to have to set the proper payee and category at least 2 times before algorithm kicks in. Additionally, clean up your current payees and categories under Settings > Payees and Settings > Categories to ensure consistency. Verify older transactions for incorrect details and adjust as needed to avoid future mismatches. If needed, consider disabling auto-features in account settings to maintain control over categorization, allowing only manual matching for payees and categories.
In many cases, payee information is not available for online banking transactions. In this case MoneyWiz scans the transaction description and tries to find a match with your list of payees. If it finds a match it will use this payee to find a category. It is important that you help this algorithm by setting up proper payees in MoneyWiz. Here is a list of tips, that may be helpful:
For inaccuracies in payee or category detection, edit the transactions to correct the payee or category. Over time, the system will recognize patterns from repeated corrections, generally after three edits to similar transactions.
the comparison is not case sensitive. If the descriptions of your transactions are all capital letters, you don’t have to create your payees with just capital letters.
it can be a partial match, meaning that your payee doesn’t have to be the entire description of the online banking transaction.
it’s a strict comparison, meaning that the description of the transaction has to contain the payee name in its entirety.
Examples
Note, that is it not sufficient to just have the payee in your list of payees. That will help MoneyWiz match the payee, indeed. But if you need MoneyWiz to recognize the category, you will have to have an existing transaction with a proper payee and category for MoneyWiz to read from. For this reason, it is common to need to set the proper payee and category at least three times before the algorithm begins applying corrections consistently.
