Automatic categorization of financial transactions
First Claim
1. A method of automatically categorizing a financial transaction having a transaction description, the method comprising:
- filtering the transaction description to produce a filtered transaction description;
determining whether the filtered transaction description matches a category lookup-facility entry; and
upon finding a match between the filtered description and a category lookup-facility entry, assigning a financial category to the transaction based on the match.
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Abstract
Financial transactions are automatically categorized based on mappings of filtered transaction descriptions to financial categories. The filtered transaction descriptions may exclude extraneous characters and unwanted prefix and suffix characters. A category lookup facility tries to find a match between a stored category-description pair lookup entry and a transaction'"'"'s filtered description. Upon finding a matching entry, a financial category is assigned to the transaction based on the category of the matching stored category-description pair. The category lookup facility may include stored global-user lookup data, which may be based on how multiple users of the system have previously categorized transactions.
59 Citations
29 Claims
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1. A method of automatically categorizing a financial transaction having a transaction description, the method comprising:
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filtering the transaction description to produce a filtered transaction description;
determining whether the filtered transaction description matches a category lookup-facility entry; and
upon finding a match between the filtered description and a category lookup-facility entry, assigning a financial category to the transaction based on the match. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29)
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17. A computer system that automatically categorizes financial transactions, the system comprising:
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a description filter that accepts as input financial transaction descriptions and produces as output filtered descriptions;
a category lookup facility that, upon finding a match between a filtered description and stored lookup facility data, assigns a financial category to the filtered description; and
wherein the category lookup facility includes global-user data that indicates how a plurality of users have previously assigned financial categories to transactions.
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25. A computer readable medium storing computer-readable global-user data comprising:
- a plurality of filtered financial transaction description-and-financial category pairings based on how a plurality of system users have assigned financial categories to financial transactions, wherein;
the filtered description-and-financial category pairings are based on a set of transactions that has been filtered to exclude transactions in accordance with one or more predetermined criteria;
each filtered description-and-financial category pairing has a corresponding count value that indicates how often the pairing'"'"'s filtered description has been categorized with the pairing'"'"'s financial category;
the filtered description-and-financial category pairings have been filtered to exclude pairings that do not have associated count values that exceed a threshold; and
the filtered description-and-financial category pairings have been selected for inclusion into the global-user data such that, if multiple filtered description-and-financial category pairings have common filtered descriptions but different financial categories, a filtered description-and-financial category pairing is selected for inclusion in the global-user data from among the multiple filtered pairings such that a pairing that has a largest associated count value is included in the global-user data and any remaining pairings that have relatively smaller associated count values are excluded from the global-user data.
- a plurality of filtered financial transaction description-and-financial category pairings based on how a plurality of system users have assigned financial categories to financial transactions, wherein;
Specification