I’ve been an Emma Ultimate subscriber for a few years now. I use categories to separate out my spending and a small number of tags for specific things.
I’ve just been into my account to check and update categories and I’ve found that a very large number of transactions have had tags automatically added. I don’t know whether this is a new feature, a change in the algorithm or if it’s just something I haven’t noticed before but it’s really inconvenient.
The tags I use aren’t dependent on the payee, the date or amount, so there’s no way an algorithm will be able to apply them correctly. For example, I use a tag #gifts when I purchase something for someone else - which is impossible for the algorithm to know. I’m now finding #gifts added to every transaction, for retailers that I’ve bought gifts from previously.
Tags aren’t shown in the transaction list, so this means I now have to check every transaction individually, to see whether it has been auto-tagged, then remove the tag. This is very time-consuming, to the point that it probably makes Emma App unusable for me.
Hoping there’s a way to turn this off or adjust the behaviour?
as of today, we have a learning algorithm for tags and categories; we re-apply them based on usage. The way you are using them is quite specific and definitely breaks with how we have implemented them. We can consider having a switch off button somewhere in settings; unfortunately we don’t have this feature yet.
I agree with the comment id like to turn off tags i set them manually as a way to group transactions could be japan2026 for example and that way there us no pattern.
I would like a transaction inbox to show anything i havent sorted since last log in and then can check categories and tags to clear them all i know that is a requested feature already
Thanks for the quick reply. Auto-assigning categories is very useful but surely the whole point of tags, is to be able to provide another more granular layer of separation or to group transactions that fall across different categories. I would be surprised if most people weren’t using them this way (although I could be wrong about this, of course!).
Algorithms have a very limited amount of data available to them (payee, date/frequency and amount), so there’s no way they can accurately predict or learn what tags to apply and when. So personally, I feel it would be much better to leave tags as a manual activity by the user or allow the user to disable auto-tagging.
If this isn’t possible, it would make checking and correcting tags much quicker and easier, if they could be shown in the transaction list view, without having to open and check each individual transaction, which is a huge pain! I’ve uploaded an example of what I mean.
I must confess, the original selling point for tags was that they provided a totally unique way to label transactions just for the user. It goes against that to have an algorithm. I have had tags assigned as previous transactions, which is never right so basically export to Excel and regularly check to see where the rogue ones are. I would just like the algorithm removed.
Ok here’s my vote in the opposite camp, I actually like and make heavy use of auto tagging, e.g. I label all interest income transactions as #interest, or all bank rewards as #reward (both positive and negative - for example for NWG accounts I have both “earn £x for 2 DDs / earn £1 for mobile app log in” and the monthly fee tagged, which allows to easily track the net profit; same for paid rewards CCs). Having to manually tag those every time would be a lot more tedious.
My pet peeve is (was?) the auto tags a few years back (I think they stopped now?). I still have silly historical tags like “Café, Food, Restaurant, Sandwiches, Takeaway” for eateries. There were lots of others but I bulk cleaned them up at some point.
I label all interest income transactions as #interest, or all bank rewards as #reward (both positive and negative - for example for NWG accounts I have both “earn £x for 2 DDs / earn £1 for mobile app log in” and the monthly fee tagged, which allows to easily track the net profit; same for paid rewards CCs). Having to manually tag those every time would be a lot more tedious.
Good point, I also use it for things like #interest and #giftaid which are sub-categories of a particular category and can be predicted based on the merchant/transaction description.
I guess ideally I want some tags to be auto applied and others not but that’s probably overly complicated as a design. So maybe the right balance is to make it an optional feature, and when it’s turned on make it somewhat conservative - i.e. don’t extrapolate from a single transaction and if auto applied tags get removed manually then the level of certainty for applying that one automatically should be decreased; if it gets manually added to a similar transaction the certainty increases for future applications of the same tag.
My pet peeve is (was?) the auto tags a few years back (I think they stopped now?). I still have silly historical tags like “Café, Food, Restaurant, Sandwiches, Takeaway” for eateries. There were lots of others but I bulk cleaned them up at some point.
Absolutely agree with this, these were stupid and I wasted a decent chunk of time clearing them out because they irked me so much and I wanted to start using tags more.
