Categorise-assist

Summary

Categorise-assist is a modal on the Expense transactions surface that lets the user teach the auto-categoriser when the parser is ambiguous. It surfaces AI-suggested categories with confidence percentages, exposes a full tax-aware chip menu, and optionally creates a merchant rule so future descriptors from the same merchant auto-classify. It never executes external action — no cancellation, no move-money, no message-to-merchant.

Why it matters

Ambiguous merchant descriptors are the single biggest source of miscategorised expense rows, which then propagate into wrong donut slices, wrong tax-linked chip attribution (§80C / §80D), and wrong "Largest outflows" flags. The failure mode we're guarding against: a user asks an assistant "why is my Groceries donut so small?" and the assistant confidently answers using data that a mis-parsed ASHIRWAD ENTERPRISES row (actually groceries, classified as Household) polluted. Categorise-assist is the organise affordance under read-only-review — teaching the parser is the only lever we offer.

Implications

• Parser correction, never action. The modal never cancels a subscription, pauses a payment, contacts a merchant, or moves money. It edits how a parsed row is labelled, nothing else.
• Modal context, not a table edit. Rich context per row: "Last 90d: <N> txns · Avg ₹<X>". This is what makes the pick informed — the same merchant across time.
• AI suggestions carry confidence. Ranked list e.g. Groceries 82% · Household 12% · Health 6%. The number is load-bearing — users skim it to decide whether to trust the top pick or scroll the chip menu.
• Chip menu is tax-aware. Beyond the 8 base categories (pillar-expense), tax-linked chips (§80C invest, §80D health insur, §80DDB, §80C · Edu, Insurance, Loan, Transfer, Gift / loan, One-off · skip, + Custom) let the user route the row directly into pillar-tax deduction eligibility.
• Merchant rules are opt-in on the same modal. "Apply to all future <MERCHANT> charges" checkbox creates a rule editable in Settings · Merchant rules. Rules match by descriptor pattern; multiple rules per merchant are allowed.
• One-off · skip removes a txn from cashflow but keeps it in the transactions ledger for audit. Used for Transfer between own accounts or Gift / loan events that shouldn't count as either Income or Expense.
• Header sets the mental model. "Pick a category — teach the auto-categoriser" — the verb is teach, not fix. Reframes categorisation as parser-training, not per-row bookkeeping.
• Cascades into merchant rules and the identity tree. A merchant rule applies retroactively to all matching rows and to future ones; if the merchant has a linked identity (e.g. Bank ••Rakesh under identity-buckets), rules don't change identity-routing, only category-labeling.
• Aliases into Portfolio via Transfer / Invest chips. A row categorised §80C invest or Transfer to broker becomes a candidate for the Portfolio Invested KPI decomposition — a hint for future work, not a V1 wire.

Related

• expense-pillar — where categorise-assist lives
• pillar-expense — entity: chip taxonomy + merchant-rule keys
• read-only-review — parent invariant (organise, never act)
• upload-only · no-manual-entry — no new txns are created here; only labels change
• pillar-tax — tax-linked chips feed Tax review
• expense-transactions — the surface the modal opens from
• copy-strings — modal header + chip labels
• design-color-semantics — confidence-percent color scale

Sources

• .context/designs/web/expense/categorise.html
• .context/designs/web/expense/transactions.html