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Improve categorization accuracy

Teach Big Picture Money how you categorize merchants so future imports and new transactions match your intent.

Prerequisites​

  • Big Picture Money is unlocked
  • You have at least one transaction to categorize

Steps​

  1. Open Transactions and pick a row with a wrong or missing category.
  2. Choose the category you want — for example Travel → Lodging for a hotel stay like TAMPA EMBASSY SUITES TAMPA.
  3. For merchants you use in different ways, categorize each pattern separately. Walmart groceries and Walmart shopping can both be valid when the bank text differs.
  4. Optional: turn on Help improve categorization so your anonymous choices can improve default categories for everyone. The easiest place is the encouraging option during first-run setup (after you create your data file). You can also enable it later under Settings → General. The setting stays off until you turn it on. When you turn it on, Big Picture Money also queues past manual categorizations from this data file.
  5. Optional: use Queue past categorizations under Settings → General if you already had contribution on but pending contributions still shows zero — this rebuilds the upload queue from your historical manual (and reviewed) category choices.
  6. Optional: use Send now under Settings → General when you want to upload pending contributions immediately instead of waiting for the once-per-day send.
  7. Optional: create a Categorization rule under Categories & Rules when every transaction containing a phrase should always map to the same category.

Expected result​

  • The transaction shows your chosen category immediately
  • Similar future transactions suggest the same category before merchant-database lookup runs
  • When crowd contribution is enabled, Pending contributions increments after you categorize (and after Queue past categorizations), and Send now (or the daily send) uploads only hashed identifiers plus category names — never raw payee or description text
  • After restart, your manual choices and learned patterns remain on this device
  • Turning contribution on at setup or in Settings persists until you turn it off