Suggestion rules drive how Weekly recommends how to file your transactions when reviewing them.
In this knowledge base article, we will discuss how the logic behind how our suggestion rules work.
How Weekly’s Suggestions show up
All transactions that come into Weekly can be one of four types.
- Safe-to-Spend – A transaction whose amount should be taken from the week’s Safe-to-Spend.
- Recurring – A transaction that is for a recurring expense that has already been setup as a budget item.
- Fund – A transaction whose amount should be taken from a Fund.
- Ignore – A transaction that should be ignored.
To speed up the transaction review process, Weekly will suggest how to file away these transactions.
Weekly’s suggestions show up in two places – the individual transaction review and the bulk transaction review.
Individual Transaction Review
First, they show up with reviewing transaction individually underneath the transaction itself. Tapping on the suggestion will chose the destination and the category, recurring charge or fund.
Transaction Review List Screen
Weekly’s suggestions also show up in the icon color and emoji selection on the Bulk Transaction Review screen.
The color of the square indicates the transaction type and if the suggestion is a Safe-to-Spend transaction, the category will be suggested by the icon. In the square below this is a Safe-to-Spend transaction
How Weekly makes its suggestions
The order of priority of suggestions is as follows
- Manual transaction match – If you have manually entered a transaction whose amount matches a bank transaction, this will be our top suggestion.
- User-defined Vendor to Safe-to-Spend category, Recurring Charge, Fund or Ignore type.
- Pricing and Vendor matching to a Recurring expense budget item
- Bank suggested category to Weekly category based on customer mapping on the Category screen.
- Transfers and cc payments are suggested to Ignore (if no other rule applies)
Let’s go into a little more detail on each priority step.
Manual transactions
To keep Weekly up-to-date, you may have put in a manual transaction to keep your Safe-to-Spend accurate while you are waiting for transactions to sync. If you have done this. based on the transaction amount, Weekly will first suggest mapping a download transaction to a manual transaction of the same value.
User-defined vendor
When approving transaction, Weekly will show you a “Always Suggest” dialog for that vendor. So for example, if a charge for your power bill always comes from a vendor called “Dominion Energy” you can choose to “Always suggest” that the transactions from “Dominion Energy” be mapped to your “Power” recurring budget item. Similarly, you can choose to “Always suggest” certain vendors for Safe-to-Spend categories or specific Funds.
If you have any of these “Always Suggest” rules set up for a particular vendor, then when a transaction comes through, these rules are given second priority after manual transactions.
Pricing and Vendor matching to Recurring charge
If a charge from a vendor comes through and it matches the amount and the vendor associated with a recurring expense, then Weekly will recommend this mapping even if a user defined vendor has not been defined yet.
Bank category
When transactions are downloaded from the bank, the bank has already defined a category for that transaction. We have mapped these categories to our default active and inactive categories. This type of suggestion rules are very helpful when first starting Weekly or when you purchase from vendors that Weekly has not seen before, Weekly can suggest a category based on the bank category.
Transfers and credit card payments are suggested to Ignore (if no other rule applies)
Since there is no actual spending happening, transfers and credit card payments are default suggested to “Ignore”.
Two suggestions
Based on the rules above, Weeky may have two suggestions. In this case the highest priority suggestion will be listed on the left and the next will be listed on the right.
Conclusion
Based on these priority rules, Weekly will decide what to suggest in the individual and bulk transaction review screens. These suggestions make the transaction review process quick (and fun!) keeping you in touch with where you are at with your spending on a weekly basis.