You will be able to spot miscategorised transactions quickly and make the labels consistent month to month.
Priya's labelled month came back with 87 rows, eleven of them marked CHECK. She sorted those herself in a few minutes and felt done. Then she glanced down the food column and saw her monthly payment to her mother sitting there as food, because the PayNow description included the word "makan" she'd typed as a joke when setting it up.
The assistant had made a reasonable guess. It was still wrong, and in a budget a wrong label is worse than a missing one, because it moves money into a category where it looks normal. This lesson is about finding those quickly and making sure next month has fewer of them.
Don't read the labelled rows in date order. Errors hide there, because every row is surrounded by unrelated ones.
Sort the sheet by the category column instead. Now all the transport rows sit together, then all the food rows, and so on. Scan each group from top to bottom. Similar things look similar, so the odd one out stands out: a S$400 line in the middle of S$8 coffee and S$15 lunches, a hospital name inside subscriptions, a hardware shop inside groceries.
This takes most people five to ten minutes for a month. Fix each wrong label as you go, directly in the category column.
A few errors come up so often that it's worth looking for them on purpose.
Supermarket runs labelled as dining, or the other way round. Some supermarkets have cafes, some food courts have names that sound like shops, and a short merchant code doesn't say which counter you paid at. If you split food into groceries and eating out, check the boundary between them.
PayNow transfers labelled as other, or as anything at all. A transfer to a person carries a name, initials or a reference you typed, and the assistant has nothing to go on. Money to family, splitting a dinner bill with friends and paying back a colleague all look alike. Only you know which is which.
Rides labelled as food delivery, or the reverse. Some apps do both, and the card description often shows only the company name. The amount and the time are clues: a S$14 charge at 8.40am on a weekday is more likely a ride than breakfast.
Refunds treated as spending. A refund from a shop often appears with the same merchant name as the purchase. If your amounts use positive for spending, the refund should be negative, and it belongs in the same category as the purchase so the two cancel out.
Every correction you make this month is a correction you'll make again next month unless you write it down. So keep a short list of merchant rules in a tab of its own. Each rule is a plain sentence the assistant can follow:
"Any PayNow transfer containing MAKAN or MUM is family." "Ride app lines marked as trips are transport; its food orders are eating out." "TOWN COUNCIL is bills." "The pharmacy chain is health, not shopping."
Next month, paste these rules into the request above your category list, with a line saying "Apply these rules first." The model follows explicit rules much more reliably than it guesses, and your CHECK pile shrinks. After two or three months, most people find the list stops growing, because their spending is more regular than it feels.
Keep the rules factual and specific to your own statement. "Grab is transport" is too broad if you also order food through the same app; write the code or wording that separates the two, using what actually appears in your export.
One label needs special care. Money moving between your own accounts is not spending. If you pay your credit card bill from your savings account, and you're budgeting from both, the same spending shows up twice: once as purchases on the card, and again as the bill payment from savings. A transfer into your investment account or your own fixed deposit is the same. It's still your money, just in a different place.
Tag these rows as transfer, and leave that category out of your spending totals. Lesson 2.4, Build a month's budget from your own data, builds the summary so that transfer is listed but not counted. Getting this wrong is the most common reason a first budget shows someone spending more than they earn when they plainly aren't.
Priya found three transfer rows labelled as other: two card bill payments and a top-up to her brokerage account. Together they would have added more than a thousand dollars of spending that never happened.
Go through your own month the same way, sorted by category, and keep a note of every pattern you fix. That note is the start of your rules list.
Correct every wrong label in your month, then write a short list of merchant rules to reuse in next month's prompt.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).