ability to disable automatic categorization for certain merchants

Solano

It can be helpful for categories to be automatically assigned to some merchants, but for some merchants (e.g., amazon.com, Costco, etc.) multiple categories could be relevant. It would be helpful to be able to disable this automatic categorization for selected merchants only.

Christina Dobryzynski

Thanks for posting this Idea @Solano! Let me take a second to go over how Categories currently work in Expensify to narrow down the ways we can improve them.

Categories in Expensify are "sticky" (aka. Implicit Categorization), which means a new expense will automatically have the same category as an old expense from the same merchant.

For expenses where multiple categories are relevant, the employee and policy admin are always able to choose a category for a specific expense based on the categories created (or imported from a connected accounting package) at Settings > Policies > Group > [Policy Name] > Categories. We have more information about policy categories in this support article.

Based on this overview, can you give me a little more detail about what you think would be helpful? I look forward to hearing from you!

Solano

Thank you, @Christina. Yes, I understand how categories work. The issue is that we require a category for the report to be complete. If Expensify automatically categorizes it, there is a small possibility that the report will export with the wrong category if someone does not get to their expense report in a timely fashion before it automatically submits. Does that make sense?

Lauren Schurr

Totally makes sense. Unfortunately, it's not possible to remove implicit categorization at this time, but having this idea here will allow others to vote for it. Thanks for your feedback @Solano!

Solano

Thanks, @Lauren Schurr. Will wait to see if others have the same issue.