Automated Categorization

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It’s been two weeks since my last release. It’s felt like an eternity.

I live in Austin, and I lost power for 80+ hours. I wound up raising money, driving around to feed people, and then organizing 20+ volunteers to distribute the food more efficiently. Because I was tired of just sitting in my car for warmth feeling helpless.

Honestly, it took my mind out of the game, switching from building stuff to basic survival. And I had to play catchup at my day job which took extra effort.

Anyway, I finally got my head wrapped around a simple recursive model (a step below machine learning) that will make transaction categorization become increasingly better.

Everything was under the hood.

The user experience will be substantially improved over time, but it’s more subtle than prior weeks.

At a high level, I created a delineation between different types of categorization. There is now a rules-based categorization that is specific to each user based on how they match vendors. And there’s an implicit set of rules that are based on the most common categorizations of transactions by all users.

But over time, I don’t want users to have to set any rules. And this is where the implicit rules come into play. By taking all the categorizations that have been created, and then identifying the most common categorizations for specific vendors / merchants, I can serve users with an automated categorization. But users will always want the ability to set their own rules when they want, especially at the beginning while the implicit rules are being set-up.

Over time, the implicit rules should become increasingly better since it runs regularly.

At some point, I’ll make the user-based rules more explicit by giving a front-end experience that allows users to make changes and add new rules. But that’s for another day.

The February Investor Update will be coming out soon. After reviewing my plans, I’m still on track to get the MVP launched end of March, and while it won’t look much different from today, it will allow me to move over my finances and the data should finally be accurate.

And then the real fun will begin.

More to come.

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