[mrngm]

YNAB4 or YNAB Classic, the standalone desktop application based on Adobe Air, was already quite capable of learning the categories for transaction, of course after you've provided them a few times. This still works good to this day, without LLMs; I'm regularly importing bank transactions, and usually I only have to confirm the category. There are just a few cases where there's still manual action required.

If you're looking for fully automated recognition of transactions, that might be useful for bookkeeping, but I think this creates too much distance between you spending money (and the application just confirming that) and the wish for conforming to your predefined budget.

Another trick I've seen people do, which is of course more time consuming, is manually enter every transaction into such a budgeting tool. This trick keeps you really close to your spending behaviour, instead of mindlessly looking at spending graphs after the fact. It gives you a chance to reevaluate with every transaction whether your everyday spending, or subscriptions, or other periodic spending is still needed, useful, and if cutting those costs might help you stay within budget, and maintaining your preferred quality of life.

[anon7000]

YNAB does keep the same category for the same merchant, but it’s not good at remembering the merchant name sadly. As an example, direct deposit payments are like “COMPANY INC DIRECT DEP 123~ Tran: Ach”, which I rename to just “Company”, and YNAB basically never remembers that (because the number changes in the Payee field), which means it doesn’t remember the category either. There are a number of merchants that cause problems here

[hirvi74]

I've always entered data manually into budgets/expense trackers. I used YNAB for many years until I decided it wasn't worth the money. I was grandfathered into a cheap subscription price, but YNAB hiked the price for everyone a few years back, and I left.

I currently use a spreadsheet, and of course, I still do everything manually. I have basically no self-discipline and even poorer self-regulation, but somehow, I am able to enter transactions every day. If you stay on top of your transactions, it's not really that much time. I probably do not spend more than two minutes a day, if that even (about the same when I was using YNAB too).