I played a bit with the basic concept of identifying and categorizing merchants by importing a transaction csv into google sheets and writing a custom function that called the OpenAI API, basically just passing the raw merchant string along with “What category of business is this?”. It did well, the next step would have been to add a step that compared to a predefined list of possible categories. I didn’t compare any models or other platforms though. This was last year so I might play with it again.

Yep, that’s exactly the sort of thing I’m thinking about here. And it doesn’t even need to be full on chat style LLM, just some decent NLP that can recognize WALMART, WAL-MART, or WMART are all the same thing and label it.

But for some reason this question brings out all the assumption people who want to give financial advice or talk about the AI image the saw last year with 6 fingers.