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Excel Top Tip #4 - Categorise acronym variations


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Hello


Bank statements frequently refer to payments to or from the same company or individual using a variety of different acronyms. You might also find yourself in need of classifying many payees into a single group, like ‘travel’.  


This can get frustrating when constantly filtering by a new keyword that you missed, or you end up resorting to a never ending nested IF statement, both of which have low limits in Excel for the number of variations that can be incorporated.


This can be a particular issue for insolvency investigations when finding payments to HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC).


With our Excel Top Tip, you can solve this problem and categorise bank transactions like a pro.


Top Tip #4 – Categorise acronym variations and multiple payees


By using this formula structure, you’ll be able to find payees with different keywords in the transaction narrative with a robust, replicable, readable advanced process that'll impress your colleagues:



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And here is an example that is particularly useful for returning true or false against a list of 100s or 1000s of transactions when the narrative matches one of the many acronyms for HMRC (or your country’s tax office). 

=SUMPRODUCT( --ISNUMBER(SEARCH(" "&{"HMRC","HM","Rev&Cus","VAT","PAYE“,"RCus","NIC","NatIns","Ninsurance"}&" "," "&INDIRECT("RC[-1]",0)&" ")) )>0

However, it has many other uses which we’d love to see you explore and share with us. Let us know how you get on!

Thank you,


The StatementReader Team

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