3 Ways to Auto-Categorize Bank Transactions in Airtable

If you use Airtable for your personal or business finances, you know how nice of a tool it can be. However, as a flexible platform, there have always been multiple ways of categorizing transactions. Here's a quick overview of 3 different methods that we've seen work.

Let's start with a quick comparison of the available methods:

	Cost	Setup	Rerun Rules	AI
Airtable Automations	Airtable paid plan	Complex	No	No
Views + Filters	Airtable AI add-on	Initially tedious	Yes	Yes, but not configurable
Fintable Categorizer	Included with Fintable	Simple	Yes	Coming soon

In this guide, we'll explore three distinct ways of automating your transaction categorization in Airtable, culminating with our newest solution: the Fintable Categorizer. Each method has its unique advantages, and understanding all three will help you choose the best approach for your specific needs.

Method 1: (Not Recommended) Airtable Automations

When people first think about automating transaction categorization in Airtable, they often turn to Automations. While this built-in feature might seem like an obvious solution, it comes with several significant drawbacks that make it less than ideal.

First and foremost, Automations are a premium feature that requires an expensive paid Airtable plan. This puts it out of reach for many users who are just getting started with financial management in Airtable. Even for those who can afford it, the cost might not justify the limited functionality it provides for transaction categorization.

When using Airtable automations, you create "if-this-then-that" rules directly in your base. For example, you might set up an automation that says "If the transaction description contains 'AMAZON', categorize it as 'Shopping'." However, these rules come with serious limitations:

The most frustrating aspect of using Automations for categorization is that they only run once on new records and can't be easily re-run on existing data. This means if you need to update your categorization rules, you'll have to manually apply them to all your historical transactions - a tedious and error-prone process.

Managing rules through the automation interface becomes increasingly cumbersome as your ruleset grows. Each rule requires its own automation, leading to a cluttered automation panel that's difficult to maintain and debug. There's also no way to prioritize rules or handle conflicts between them - if a transaction matches multiple rules, you have no control over which category gets applied.

Method 2: (Recommended) Views and Filters - The "Airtabley" Way

This is the way that we have always recommended, and it feels very native to the Airtable experience. This method uses the power of Airtable's views and filters, allowing you to categorize transactions quickly, while being able to see the full history of your categorization decisions and change them as needed.

The process typically looks like this:

1. Create a view with filters for a specific category
2. Use batch update to assign categories to all matching transactions (i.e. drag down your mouse)
3. Save these views for future use with similar transactions

This approach offers more control and visibility than pure automations, as you can see all matching transactions before applying categories. However, it requires more manual intervention and doesn't provide true automation - you'll need to regularly review and update categories as new transactions come in.

When combined with Airtable's AI-powered category selector, this can be partially automated assuming the AI can figure out the category from the description text.

Method 3: Fintable Categorizer

At Fintable, we've taken the feedback and lessons learned from our thousands of users and tried to create a dedicated solution that "just works", while having the flexibility of being expanded in the future with more AI-powered integrations. We built the Categorizer as a separate dashboard from your Airtable base, providing a dedicated space for managing your categorization rules and logic.

Key features of the Categorizer include:

• Categorization rules or manual overrides for each transaction
• Conflict resolution: Warning of transactions that match multiple rules
• Works with any Airtable base, Google Spreadsheet, or even built-in analysis
• (Coming soon) Advanced patterns: use JSONLogic to create complex matching rules
• (Coming soon) AI-powered suggestions: Learn from your categorization patterns and suggest improvements

About Fintable

Fintable is an Airtable Marketplace app that syncs your bank balances and transactions directly to Airtable, allowing you to see all your personal and business finances in one place. Through partnerships with Plaid and GoCardless, we provide secure access to over 15,000 banks across 30+ countries. Our users range from accounting firms and investors to small businesses and individuals who use Airtable as their personal finance tool.