Concepts

Smart categorization

How Trove classifies your transactions, and how to teach it.

Two questions, two fields

Every transaction answers two different questions, and Trove keeps them apart:

• What was it for? That is the category: Food, Travel, Fuel and so on.
• How did you pay? That is the payment method: UPI, credit card, cash, bank transfer or other.

A dinner paid by UPI is Food, paid by UPI. Earlier versions of Trove had UPI and credit card as categories, which meant a UPI-paid meal could never also be Food. They are payment methods now, so your reports can show both: where the money went, and how it left.

Your starting categories

Every account starts with the same small set, and they are yours from that moment. They are rows in your account, not a list baked into the app:

Three more are set up behind the scenes: Income, Transfer and a catch-all Other. You can rename those, but not delete them, because Trove needs somewhere to file a payment it can't place.

A short list is deliberate. A category list you can hold in your head is one you'll actually keep up with.

How a category is chosen

Trove tries the cheapest answer that can be right, in this order:

1. What you already decided. When you re-file a merchant, Trove remembers it, and the next payment to that merchant goes to the same place.
2. Rules you can read. Patterns match the merchant and description against a rulebook. Examples:
   • swiggy|zomato → Food
   • bigbasket|blinkit|zepto → Groceries, or Food if you don't have Groceries
   • indian oil|hpcl|petrol pump → Fuel, or Transport
   • zerodha|groww|upstox → Investments
   • irctc|makemytrip|indigo → Travel
   • netflix|spotify|hotstar → Subscriptions
3. A language model, only for what the first two missed, and only when you import. It must pick one of your own categories, and the inbox shows which of the three made each choice.

Rules only ever return a category you actually have. A grocery charge goes to Groceries if you've added it and falls back to Food if you haven't. A rule whose categories you have none of is skipped, so a Netflix charge on the starting set lands in Other until you add Subscriptions. Anything unmatched goes to Other, and you can re-categorise it.

How the payment method is chosen

The payment method is read from the description with its own rules. A UPI handle such as name@okhdfcbank or @ybl, or a mention of Google Pay, PhonePe, BHIM or Paytm, suggests UPI. NEFT, IMPS and RTGS suggest bank transfer, and a card bill suggests credit card. When you say or type a payment yourself, the method you name wins. The category never depends on the method.

Making them yours

Settings → Categories. Rename anything, add your own, or nest one level deep, so a bucket like Miscellaneous can break down into the parts you care about. Sub-categories show as Miscellaneous › Gifts wherever you pick one, so two things with the same name are never ambiguous.

There's also a library of about 25 more (Groceries, Rent, Health, Insurance, Business and others) to add if you want them. They start switched off rather than on: an empty category is noise, and you can add one the moment you need it.

Why this approach

We considered classifying everything with a model. It might have been slightly more accurate and much harder to explain. A rule you can read is a mistake you can fix at the source, so rules and your own choices come first, and the model only fills the gaps.