Abstract: Financial transactions are automatically categorized based on mappings of filtered transaction descriptions to financial categories. The filtered transaction descriptions may exclude extraneous characters and unwanted prefix and suffix characters. A category lookup facility tries to find a match between a stored category-description pair lookup entry and a transaction's filtered description. Upon finding a matching entry, a financial category is assigned to the transaction based on the category of the matching stored category-description pair. The category lookup facility may include stored global-user lookup data, which may be based on how multiple users of the system have previously categorized transactions.