Home Credit Card Manager ™ - Category Auto Matching

Category Auto-Matching

To save you manually allocating categories to every transaction, Home Credit Card Manager Lite provides you with a Category Auto-Matching tool.

Note: The Auto Match option will remain disabled until the account contains at least one statement.

Overview

The category auto-matching tool tries to match categories to transactions automatically, and once tuned to your needs it will do most of the matching for you.

The tool uses two main techniques, which are covered in more detail below:

1. Previously Matched Transactions.
2. Category Wildcard Patterns.

Previously Matched Transactions

Some transactions come up month after month on your credit card statements. For example, if your internet provider is ABC Internet Provider and you pay them on a monthly basis, you would see a transaction similar to "ABC Internet Provider, Inc" on your statement each month.

The first month you load your statement into Home Credit Card Manager Lite you would manually assign it to an appropriate category (for example "HOME - Computer").

When running the auto-matching tool in subsequent months, it will recognise that the category "HOME - Computer" should be assigned to all "ABC Internet Provider, Inc" transactions and automatically match them for you.

Category Wildcard Patterns.

Often a word in a transaction description can make it a good candidate to be placed in a category.

For example, you may decide that any transaction description containing the word "restaurant" should be assigned the category "HOME - Eating Out".

This type of matching can be easily achieved through the Category Wildcard Patterns.

For example, from above, you could set up the wildcard "contains restaurant" for the category "HOME - Eating Out". In addition, you could add a second wildcard "contains cafe".

When you run the auto-matching tool, any transaction containing "restaurant" or "cafe" would automatically have the category "HOME - Eating Out" assigned to it

From the Category menu choose Category Maintenance to set up and maintain Category Wildcard Patterns.

Restrictions

The auto-matching tool has been designed to assign categories to transactions only if they have not already been matched.

This will prevent it trying to change any categories that you have manually assigned or previously auto-matched.

Running the Auto Match tool

1. From the Action menu choose Auto Match.
2. Select the statement you wish to auto match.
3. By default the auto-matching tool will use the Category Wildcard Patterns. If you do not wish to use the category wildcard patterns deselect the "Match to Category Wildcard Patterns" check box.
4. By default the auto-matching tool will use to all previously loaded statements. You can select the number of statements to match to by selecting from the drop down list.
5. By default the auto-matching tool will try to match descriptions using the first 10 letters in the transaction description. This can be useful when two descriptions start with the same words (eg "HANDYMANS HARDWARE"), however the bank adds transaction numbers to the end of the descriptions to make them unique (eg "HANDYMANS HARDWARE 18293", "HANDYMANS HARDWARE 29833". By default these two descriptions don't match, however by using the first 10 letters in the matching process the auto-matching tool will be able to match them. You can choose the number of letter you want to match, ranging from five letters (lots of matches, less accuracy) to an exact match using all letters (fewer matches, more accuracy).