Quick start 2: Auto-categorization
We recommend first completing Quick start: Reports before following this guide.
This Quick start guide will walk you through the steps to configure Teal’s auto-categorization feature by using the cash flow report from the previous guide.
1. Configure the auto-categorization pipeline
Start by opening the Categorization section of the Developer portal. Here you will see the auto-categorization pipeline. This pipeline will execute whenever a new transaction is submitted via the Create Transaction endpoint, or is fetched by Teal via a data integration. Auto-categorization provides a better user experience for the end user, as they will not need to manually categorize the majority of transactions.
The auto-categorization pipeline consists of three categorization steps, each of which can be indepedently enabled and configured. We won’t go into a lot of detail in this quick start, but you can visit categorization configuration for more information.
For the purposes of this step in the quickstart guide, we recommend enabling all three steps of the auto-categorization pipeline.
2. Test the auto-categorizer
You can run auto-categorization tests to check the accuracy and recategorize transactions for specific ledgers from within the Developer portal.
Once you are ready to test your auto-categorization configuration, select the instance we created in the Quick start 1: Reports guide from the dropdown menu. Select a financial account ledger in the dropdown menu. Now you can click Run Test to view the output of auto-categorization for the transactions contained in that ledger. Running the test will give a preview of the auto-categorization results, but will not apply the changes to the instances’s data.
When you are satisfied with the results of the auto-categorizer, you can click Recategorize to push these changes to the instances’s data. You can now generate a new cash flow report with the updated categories.
Recategorizing will delete and recreate all transactions in the ledger with the updated categories and associated journal entries.
3. View an updated cash flow report
As outlined in Quick start: Reports, generating a cash flow report is an as simple as calling the Get Cash flow endpoint.
curl --request get \
--url 'https://api.sandbox.teal.dev/v0/reports/cash-flow?start_date=start_date&end_date=end_date' \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer <token>' \
--header 'teal-instance-id: <instance_id>'
Congratulations! The new cash flow report object now displays the updated categories.
What to explore next
This is the end of the quickstart guide. You’re now ready to dive into Teal’s more detailed guides on how to build your accounting software offering.
A good next step is to visit the Cash Flow Report guide. This guide will go into further detail on the Cash Flow report and how to embed it into your front-end application so the end user can interact with it.