Running and Reviewing AI Categorization

AI Categorization is additive: it only touches transactions that don't already have a label in the system-owned "V8 Default - Main" category. Anything already categorized is skipped, and re-running it will only label transactions that were never categorized before — it does not recategorize everything.

What it never touches:

• Vis Category columns and Custom Columns — these are separate from the AI-generated Main and Sub categories. Running AI Categorization does not change, remove, or interfere with any labels you've manually assigned in your own Vis Category or Custom Column fields.
• Check assignment — whether a check is matched, unmatched, or assigned to a payee or payor is completely independent of categorization. Running it does not affect check matching in any way.
• Transaction kind — the field that says Withdrawal, Check, Possible Transfer, etc., is set elsewhere (at import, and later by transfer matching). Categorization never changes it.

Running AI Categorization is safe if your concern is destroying existing manual work — it operates in a separate space.

AI Categorization is one of three ways to put a category on a transaction:

• AI Categorization (this feature) — runs an external enrichment service to assign 16 main categories and up to 104 sub-categories from a fixed taxonomy. It populates "V8 Default - Main" and "V8 Default - Sub."
• Prompt Categorization — lets certain roles write a plain-language instruction describing how to label transactions. See Prompt Categorization for how that works.
• Vis Category columns and Custom Columns — up to three Vis Category columns and up to nine Custom Columns per engagement, assigned by hand or via Excel Sync. See Data Visualization and Custom Columns.

All three write to the same underlying category model, but AI Categorization and Prompt Categorization use system-owned categories while Vis Category and Custom Columns are user-created.

Click AI Categorization in the toolbar. A dialog opens listing four fields it can populate: Main category, Sub category, Location, and V8 Counterparty (a cached merchant/name field). Click to confirm.

You'll see a toast that reads exactly AI Categorization has started, please check back in a few minutes … and the job starts in the background. It runs in-process and genuinely completes; the system does not automatically refresh the screen when the job finishes. Reload the page before concluding nothing happened — the most common report of "I ran it and nothing changed" is a stale screen showing pre-job data.

If you try to run it again while a job is still in progress, you'll get AI Categorization Job is in process — only one run at a time per project.

For every transaction with a non-empty description on a non-ERP, enabled account, the job sends:

• If the transaction is linked to a matched check-image "front": the check's payor (for a positive amount) or payee (for a negative amount), plus the check's memo, prepended to the transaction's bank description.
• Otherwise: the bank description alone.

This means running AI Categorization after checks are matched can pick up check payee and payor information — but only for transactions that were never categorized before. If a transaction was already labeled on an earlier run and you later match a check to it, re-running AI Categorization changes nothing; the earlier label stands.

Because already-labeled transactions are always skipped, each run is "categorize what's new," not "recategorize everything." There is no self-service way to force a full recategorization of a subset short of clearing everything and starting over.

Clearing AI Categorization — the Reset option in the dialog — is visible and actionable only by Valid8 staff. It deletes every system-owned Main/Sub label and every cached counterparty record for the project. It does not touch your Vis Category or Custom Column assignments. If you need to clear AI categorization, contact support.

After the job completes (and after you reload the page):

1. Click Data Vis Columns in the toolbar to open the Manage Data Vis Columns dialog.
2. Check V8 Default - Main and V8 Default - Sub, then click Apply.
3. Click the Visualizations tab to see the aggregated inflow and outflow breakdown by category.

There is no plain "Category" column in the Bank Transactions grid itself — per-transaction category values surface only in Visualizations or in an export/Excel Sync file that includes category columns. If you were expecting to see a Category column appear in the grid after running AI Categorization, that's not how it works; the column isn't defined there.

For the full list of the 16 Main categories and ~104 Sub categories, see Valid8 Default Categories.