"Check" and "ACH" transactions

[danquixote]

I'm a new user with a question:

I have lots of recurring bills that show up in Mint as "Check" or "ACH Transfer" and they're always miscategorized. As I edit the information, will Mint start to learn what those transactions are?

For example, my Mortgage will always be "Check" and it will always be in the same amount and on (almost always) the same day. Will Mint learn to recognize that transaction and categorize it correctly, or will I always have to manually do that for all my bills?

Thanks.

[mlebarron]

There's been some talk about more advanced forms of autocategorization, such as always categorize items with a certain name and of a certain amount in a specific category.

However, I'm not sure what the latest status on that is. I know they're doing work on the auto rename and auto categorization, so maybe that's part of it.

Damon (the admin here) might have some more info

[bdwilson]

This is really a pain in the butt and has been an issue since they went beta. They still have not fixed it, which makes mint totally unusable to me.

Also, you still can't selectively disable certain sub-accounts within a certain bank account or rename them (my "Money Market" account gets 4% but Mint keeps telling me that other savings accounts get better interest than me because they aren't looking for Money Market, they are looking for Savings).

[Damon]

I am not 100% sure that any system would be that smart, unfortunately. But perhaps we could do something with "recommending" what a transaction should be renamed as? Our auto renaming and categorization, while awesome, is always going to have some issues with improper naming and categorization.

I think the primary issue is that "check" or "ach" won't always entirely capture the description properly.

[mlebarron]

Automatically figure it out... no, but it should be smart enough for someone to build a rule to take care of it.

Similar to the way Yodlee Moneycenter handles it... if the description contains "Check" and the amount is exactly $1438.39 (not my mortgage, I made it up) then categorize as "Mortgage"

It also has options for +/- 1,5,10 $ or %