Welcome to AutoTag Academy — you've just made the best investment in your financial workflow.

What You Get

📚 5-Chapter Mastery Course — From expense categorization fundamentals to deploying production-grade auto-tag systems. Each lesson builds on the last, with real-world examples and actionable frameworks.

💬 Community Chat — Connect with fellow students, share your rule sets, troubleshoot edge cases, and learn from each other's merchant databases.

📋 Updates & Resources — New rule templates, merchant matching patterns, and tracking app updates posted regularly.

Your First Steps

1. Start the course — Lesson 1 takes 10 minutes and immediately reframes how you think about categorization

2. Export your last 3 months of transactions — you'll need these for the hands-on exercises

3. Introduce yourself in the Community Chat — tell us what tracking app you use and your biggest categorization pain point

What to Expect

By the end of this course, you'll have:

• A custom category hierarchy tailored to your business

• 50+ auto-tag rules deployed and tested

• An exception rate below 5%

• A weekly maintenance system that takes 15 minutes

The course is sequential — each chapter unlocks after completing the previous one. This is intentional. The foundations matter.

Let's get to work. 💪

Most freelancers spend 3-5 hours per month manually categorizing expenses. Here are 5 rules you can set up in any tracking app right now to cut that in half.

Rule 1: The SaaS Sweep

IF merchant CONTAINS any of: "SLACK", "NOTION", "FIGMA", "CANVA", "ZOOM", "DROPBOX", "ADOBE"
→ Category: "Software Subscriptions"

This single rule catches 80% of your software spend.

Rule 2: The Square/Stripe Catch

IF merchant STARTS WITH "SQ *" OR "STRIPE"
→ Category: "Payment Processing Fees"

If you accept payments through Square or Stripe, the processing fees show up as expenses. Tag them automatically.

Rule 3: The Rideshare Split

IF merchant STARTS WITH "UBER" AND NOT CONTAINS "EATS"
→ Category: "Transportation"

IF merchant CONTAINS "UBER EATS" OR "DOORDASH" OR "GRUBHUB"
→ Category: "Meals"

Uber rides and Uber Eats are completely different expense categories for tax purposes. Separate them from day one.

Rule 4: The Cloud Infrastructure Rule

IF merchant CONTAINS "AWS" OR "DIGITALOCEAN" OR "HEROKU" OR "VERCEL" OR "NETLIFY"
→ Category: "Hosting & Infrastructure"

If you run any kind of online business, your cloud bills should be isolated — they're often your fastest-growing expense category.

Rule 5: The Office Supplies Catch-All

IF merchant CONTAINS "STAPLES" OR "OFFICE DEPOT" OR ("AMAZON" AND amount < $75)
→ Category: "Office Supplies"

The amount filter on Amazon is key — it prevents large Amazon purchases from being miscategorized as supplies.

---

These 5 rules alone will auto-categorize 40-60% of a typical freelancer's monthly transactions.

Want to get to 95%+? That's exactly what the full AutoTag Academy course covers — regex matching, multi-condition rules, edge case handling, and a complete deployment framework.