Category Auto-Matching

To save you manually allocating categories to every transaction, Home Loan Interest Manager 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 statement after statement. For example, the transaction that reflects the interest you are charged may appear on each statement with a description similar to "Interest Payable".

The first month you load your statement into Home Loan Interest Manager you would manually assign it to an appropriate category (for example "INTEREST - Periodic Interest").

When running the auto-matching tool in subsequent months, it will recognise that the category "INTEREST - Periodic Interest" should be assigned to all "Interest Payable" 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, one month your interest transaction may be "Interest Payable to 30 August" with the following month being "Interest Payable to 28 September". It would be convenient if any transaction description containing the words "Interest Payable" could automatically be assigned the category "INTEREST - Periodic Interest".

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

For example, from above, you could set up the wildcard "contains Interest Payable" for the category "INTEREST - Periodic Interest".

When you run the auto-matching tool, any transaction containing "Interest Payable" would automatically have the category "INTEREST - Periodic Interest" 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 selected from the drop down list.