Desinging workflow with manual step in between

Question

Hi everyone,

I have been reading through the great Alteryx community already for a while, it's a pleasure!

Currently, I am working on a workflow for my personal finance and I am wondering if anyone here can help me.

I download my card transactions from my bank in a CSV and use Alteryx to clean the data and divide the transactions into categories for further use.

However, some non-regular transaction will need manual categorization before using the data for further 'analysis'. Therefore, I was wondering what would be the best and most integrated way in Alteryx to upload my transactions, let Alteryx do the first cleaning, then manually address the transactions that Alteryx could not categorize (based on the company/supplier) and then after this input the data again into Alteryx for further analysis?

(I have been thinking about two separate workflows, 1 for cleaning and then categorizing and then input it into a new workflow for further analysis. But, then my problem is that after manually categorizing at moment A, when I will run the workflow with additional new transactions later on moment B I will again have to manually categorize the transactions from moment A). So, is there a way to let Alteryx only export the 'new' transactions to the output-file? So my manually categorized transactions from earlier won't be overwritten. And what would be the best way to integrate this whole process? (Would it be possible to do it in one, chained, workflow?

leon2020 · Answer

Yes, makes sense to add some sort of manual lookup table and join that into the workflow.  WOuld be easier for you to manage and update a text input tool rather than a formula tool.  The join will also identify "unrecognised" companies, and prompt/remind you to update the text input.

Marner · Answer

Thank you for your sharing your ideas! That sounds like a good plan. I was thinking of working with a chained app maybe then, to first run workflow A and then in the second part of the app upload the updated file for further analysis.

And I was just thinking, right now I create all 'categories' in separate functions in the Formula-tool. Wouldn't it be possible to upload a list of company names in one column and their category in the second column and let Alteryx find and replace it from there, instead of adding everything into new Formula-tool functions?

leon2020 · Answer

Sounds like multiple possible ways to deal with this.

I would keep to one workflow, clearly there must be some manual input somewhere (a text input, or formula update) which you will improve each time you come across something that needs to be added.

Or in workflow A, you are cleaning the latest weeks data/transactions only (you include date filter at the beginning*) and then output into a directory the cleaned version for each week, a file for each week with week number/date suffix, and workflow B works solely from that directory.    *in workflow A you could use TODAY to work out the latest week, or refer to the cleansed directory to identify missing weeks.

Would be interesting to see other users' point of view on how to handle this.