How to categorise transactions?

[harshilsharma63]

Is there a way to auto-categorise or maybe semi-automatic way? Can I manually export the ledger file, run a python script on it to categorise stuff for myself and re-import it?

[ananthakumaran]

There are 2 ways to categorize

1. When you import transactions from CSV (or other formats), you can use predictAccount function to categorize
2. You can use Bulk Edit to change accounts for all matching transactions.

If this doesn't work for you, you can share more context here, that might help me to come up with other solutions. You can also check https://plaintextaccounting.org/ for more tools.

[harshilsharma63]

For example this ledger entry from CC statement-

2023/01/02 NEFT PAYMENT RECEIVED
    Income:Refund:CreditCard:ICICI        -5000.68 INR
    Liabilities:CreditCard:ICICI

Because the bank statement will contain a debit entry for this, and we're considering this CC entry as income, the whole sum is probably not correct. I'm no ledger expert so I may be wrong. Thoughts?

[ananthakumaran]

This is something that's not handled by the default template. Usually, I delete this transaction (since the bank statement will have the same transaction anyway).

In general, if you import for 2 independent accounts (bank/credit cards etc) and there is an inter-account transfer, bank -> bank or bank -> cc, etc you have to delete it from one account's journal and keep it on the other account's journal. In the CC example you can do it manually or update the handlebar template to ignore this transaction (could be done by matching the description)

[harshilsharma63]

Do we have some sort of ignore category keyword such that any transaction marked with this category is ignored from all calculations? I checked the docs but couldn't find anything. If we had such a keyword, we could mark such transactions as ignored and future imports will automatically get this category from matching. That way, you don't need to manually delete a bunch of transactions every time you import something.

[ananthakumaran]

It's not there as of today, but a similar feature has been requested by another user as well, let me think about it. Paisa shows the verbatim output of ledger cli balance command in editor page, so the ledger cli also has to ignore the transaction to avoid confusion, which I don't know if possible.

[harshilsharma63]

Understood.