Transactions and categorisation

Every transaction that arrives from a connected account is categorised automatically. You do not have to sort them, and the spending breakdown fills in as they are labelled.

The categorisation runs on Gylder's own servers. Transaction details are not sent to a third party for labelling.

Correcting a category

Tap any category to change it. That is the whole interaction.

When you correct one, Gylder offers to apply the same category to every other transaction from that merchant, and tells you how many match. For a recurring merchant this turns one correction into dozens.

Your corrections also train the model. A category you set is treated as ground truth, and similar transactions in future lean towards it. This is why the first weeks involve more correcting than the months after.

Why this category?

Any transaction can tell you how it was labelled. Open Tell me why and you get one of:

You set this category. Nothing was inferred.

A learned match. Gylder found a number of transactions you have already categorised that look like this one, and followed them. It tells you how many.

A starting pattern. Before you have corrected much, Gylder falls back on patterns learned from common bank transactions.

Each comes with a confidence of high, medium or low. A low confidence says outright that Gylder is not sure and you may want to set it yourself, which is more useful than a confident guess.

What does not count as spending

Some transactions move money without spending it, and counting them would make your spending look far larger than it is. These are marked with their own type and excluded:

Transfer, money moving between your own accounts. Moving €2,000 from current to savings is not €2,000 of spending.

Trade, money moving into investments. Buying shares converts cash into an asset you still own.

Valuation, a new value recorded on a manual entry rather than money moving at all.

Repayment, money reducing your mortgage. It lowers a debt rather than disappearing.

Each of these links through to what it refers to, so a repayment opens the property and a valuation opens the entry.

This is also the answer to "why is my spending lower than the money that left my account". The difference is usually transfers and trades, working exactly as intended.

Finding what still needs categorising

There is a view for transactions with no category yet, so you can work through them in one pass rather than hunting. When it is empty it says so.

You do not have to reach zero. The spending breakdown works with whatever is categorised, and uncategorised transactions are grouped rather than hidden.

Reading the spending breakdown

The breakdown shows this month by category, with the change against last month, and drills down into any single category for its own trend.

Two longer views sit alongside it: the last 12 weeks, and the last 6 months. A month on its own is noisy, and a category that looks alarming in one month is often ordinary across six.

Practical notes

Categorisation needs transactions. Only connected accounts that provide transaction history produce them. A manual entry has a value, not a transaction feed.

Bank transactions arrive with a 30-day window per sync. Older history than that is not backfilled from the bank.

Corrections apply going forward as well as backward. Applying a merchant rule updates matching transactions you already have and shapes what happens to new ones.