How does the automatic categorization work?

When you connect your accounts to Origin, we automatically categorize your transactions to help you understand your spending and keep your financial picture accurate.

Transaction Categories

Every transaction is classified as one of three primary types:

• Income
• Expense
• Transfer

For spending transactions, Origin also assigns categories such as Groceries, Shopping, Gas/Fuel, Dining, and more.

How Transactions Are Categorized

For most transactions, Origin uses information associated with the transaction, such as the merchant, to determine the appropriate category.

For example, a transaction from a grocery store may automatically be categorized as Groceries.

Origin can also identify transfers between your own connected accounts.

When Origin confidently identifies an incoming and outgoing transaction as two sides of the same ordinary transfer, both transactions are categorized as Transfer. This prevents money you’re simply moving between accounts from being incorrectly counted as income or spending.

If Origin can’t confidently identify a matching transfer, it won’t automatically pair the transactions.

How Are Mortgage Payments Categorized?

Mortgage payments are handled differently from ordinary transfers.

Because your mortgage payment represents a real household expense, the payment leaving your bank account is categorized as an Expense — even when your mortgage account is also linked to Origin.

If Origin identifies the corresponding transaction on your mortgage account, the two transactions can still be matched, but they are categorized differently:

• The payment leaving your bank account is an Expense.
• The corresponding transaction on the mortgage account is a Transfer.

This means your mortgage payment is included once in your Spending, Budget, and cash flow without the mortgage-side transaction being incorrectly counted as income.

The same expense treatment applies whether your mortgage account is linked, unlinked, or held with an outside servicer.

This behavior applies to new transactions and doesn’t automatically rewrite existing transaction history. Rules you’ve already created will continue to take priority.

What if a Transaction Is Categorized Incorrectly?

You can manually change the type or category of a transaction at any time after it has posted.

When you change a category, Origin may also give you the option to create a Rule for similar transactions. This helps Origin categorize similar transactions according to your preferences going forward.

Transactions you’ve already manually edited won’t be overridden by automatic transfer matching.

You can also create and manage custom spending categories from your Spending Settings.