Categorization

Stoic Budget categorizes transactions deterministically, on your own server. No external model is contacted at any step.

The chain

Each imported row goes through these steps, and the first one that answers wins:

1. Your rules, in priority order. A rule you wrote is an explicit instruction and is never replaced by anything later in the chain.
2. Payee history. Stoic Budget keeps payees with their aliases and learns a default category from the rows you confirmed. The default only moves when two of the three most recent confirmed transactions agree on a different category, so one odd purchase does not refile every later one. A payee can also be pinned to a category (always) or excluded from learning (never).
3. Uncategorized. Anything left lands in Uncategorized and shows up in Review.

No category is guessed from words in a bank descriptor: those match category names by accident too often to be trusted.

Learning from corrections can be switched off under Settings → Data → Processing (Learn from my corrections).

Next: Receipt Maps