Announcing the Necessity Level Field

We’re excited to announce that we’ve added a “Necessity Level” field, which provides an identifier that indicates the level of necessity for a purchase of a product or service. The field has been introduced in the recurring_expenditures, ritual_expenses, recurring_outflows, and other_outflows endpoints.

A transaction or set of transactions can be labeled as one of the following:

• Obligatory: Bills that are due and have consequences if they are not paid (eg. loan payments, utility payments, rent)
• Essential: Not a bill, but expenses that are vital to a person’s livelihood (eg. groceries, gas)
• Nonessential: Any purchase that is optional (eg. restaurants, entertainment)

Use Cases

• Forecast how much a user has available to spend after taking into account obligatory and essential expenses
• Help users create and manage budgets based on how much they usually spend on obligatory, essential, and non-essential expenses
• Utilize these identifiers in your risk model