Transaction Categorization

Transaction categorization is a feature where we classify your Transactions into useful categories (Restaurants, gas stations, income, etc.) using our categorizer AI engine. This allows you to quickly summarize, group and extract valuable insights from your items' transactions right out of the box.

For example, you could understand how much a user spent last month in eating, how much in services, and so on, and with this show them a summary of their expenses (like in our Creating a use case from scratch guide), or you can use it to create any kind of solutions, from client profiling to income analysis.

Using categorization

We return the result of our categorization in the category field of a transaction:

{
    "id": "6ec156fe-e8ac-4d9a-a4b3-7770529ab01c",
    "description": "TED Example",
    "amount": 1500,
    "date": "2021-04-12T00:00:00.000Z",
    // Categoy's name is provided 
    "category": "Transfer - TED",
    "categoryId": "05080000",
    ...
}

The category will be a string if there was a category found, or null if we could not interpret any known category.

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Trial/Premium feature

Categorization is enabled by default during trial period. After that, it is an opt-in premium feature.

If you do not have the transaction categorization feature enabled, category will be null for all transactions.

How categories are organized

You can view all possible categories in our GET /categories endpoint. We can find the transaction's category in this list with its categoryId:

[
  {
    "id": "05080000",
    "description": "Transfer - TED",
    "descriptionTranslated": "Transferência - TED",
    "parentId": "05000000",
    "parentDescription": "Transfers"
  },
  ...
]

We can see its translation to portuguese in the descriptionTranslatedfield.

You might notice that it has a parentDescription Transfers. This means that it is under a more general category called Transfers:

[
  ...
  {
    "id": "05000000",
    "description": "Transfers"
  },
  ...
]

Categories are organized in a tree. This allows you to use more general categories or more specific ones, depending on your particular needs. The Category Tree is detailed at the bottom of this guide.

Category accuracy

As much as we constantly train our categorizer model, categorization is never perfect. In case you encounter a wrong category in a transaction, you can correct it by using our Transaction Update endpoint, or from Demo by clicking on its Categoria field.

After you submit a category correction, you will get the corrected category field on the transaction, and also feed back the correct annotation into our model, further improving the quality of categorization.

Categorization API (Categorization as a service)

If you need to categorize your own batch of transactions outside of Pluggy, we offer our categorizer engine as an API for you to use.

Want to try it out? Follow these steps:

• First, authenticate in Pluggy API to obtain an API key
• With the API key in your X-API-Key header, do a POST to https://enrichment-api.pluggy.ai/categorize with a body like this:
• JSON

  {
    "clientUserId": "[email protected]",
    "transactions": [{
      "id": "12345",
      "date": "2022-05-01T00:00:00.000Z",
      "description": "Mc Donalds",
      "amount": 100
    }]
  }
  

• You will receive a response that looks like this:
• JSON

  {
      "results": [
          {
              "id": "12345",
              "date": "2022-05-01T00:00:00.000Z",
              "description": "Mc Donalds",
              "amount": 100,
              "category": "Eating out",
              "merchant": {
                  "name": "mc donalds",
                  "businessName": "ARCOS DOURADOS COMERCIO DE ALIMENTOS LTDA",
                  "cnpj": "42.591.651/0001-43"
              }
          }
      ]
  }
  

Categorization API reference

Endpoint: : POST /categorize

Body:

• clientUserId identifier for the user (ie. email or cpf)
• transactions list of transactions to be categorized.
  List of:
  • description string
  • id string (uuid or number stringified)
  • amount number (ie. 100.30)
  • date date in ISO format
  • paymentData object referencing the related transfer details.

Limitations:

• The transactions list can contain up to 100 elements to be categorized per request. If you need to categorize more than 100 transactions, split them into multiple requests.

Response:

• status: 200 for success
• Request latency: between 0.5s to 2s depending on the payload.

Category Tree