Learned Patterns and Smart Categorisation

Overview

NivoaFlow watches how you categorise transactions and gradually learns your habits. After you assign the same merchant to the same category enough times, NivoaFlow turns that into a learned pattern and starts applying the category automatically to future transactions from that merchant.

Available on Personal and Household tiers.

How Learning Works

When you manually categorise a transaction (or correct one we got wrong), NivoaFlow records the merchant and category pair. Once it has seen the same merchant categorised the same way three or more times consistently, the pattern flips to active and starts auto-applying.

You will see two states on the Learned Patterns page:

Learning — we have noticed the pattern but are not auto-applying yet
Active — we are confident enough to auto-apply this category to new transactions from this merchant

Each pattern shows a confidence percentage and the number of times we have observed it.

Where to View Your Patterns

Go to Settings > Learned Patterns
Toggle between All and Active Only to filter the list
Each row shows the merchant, the category we learned, the status (Learning / Active), and our confidence

Deleting a Bad Pattern

If we have learned the wrong pattern — for example, we are auto-categorising a clothing store as Groceries because of a one-off mistake — remove it:

Open Settings > Learned Patterns
Find the offending pattern
Select the trash icon on the right
The pattern is deleted immediately and we stop auto-applying that category

The next time you correct a transaction from that merchant, learning starts fresh.

Learned Patterns vs. Categorisation Rules

NivoaFlow has two different ways to automate categorisation. They work side by side and serve different purposes.

	Learned Patterns	Categorisation Rules
Created by	NivoaFlow, automatically	You, manually
Trigger	Repeated manual categorisations	A pattern you define (text, regex, amount, account)
Best for	Letting the app figure out routine spending	Forcing a specific outcome you always want
Override	Delete the pattern	Edit or delete the rule

If a learned pattern and a rule conflict, rules win — they are explicit and you wrote them on purpose.

Why Was a Transaction Auto-Categorised?

Open the transaction detail view. If the category came from a learned pattern, you will see an indicator showing it was assigned automatically. You can change the category right there — your correction feeds back into the learning system, and if you correct the same merchant a few times, the pattern updates or gets retired.

Tips

Review Learned Patterns every few weeks and clean up anything that looks off
For categories you always want enforced (such as a specific salary deposit going to Income), create an explicit rule instead of relying on learning
Learning works on the merchant name, so if a single merchant covers multiple kinds of spending (e.g., a big-box store), prefer rules with amount conditions