Vlookup +

[Robert Cox]

I would like to keep track of my finances and have downloaded my bank statement to an excel workbook the sheet is called accounts

I have also produced a sheet (codes) where I have found the common string within each statement entry and trimmed it to that 

IE accounts would show

Code	Date	Description
	03/01/2018	CARD PAYMENT TO ASDA SUPERSTORE,71.37 GBP, RATE 1.00/GBP ON 01-01-2018

 and codes would show

Description	code
CARD PAYMENT TO ASDA SUPERSTORE	31

I then give each unique entry a code number

I would like excel to lookup the first entry ( Asda) in accounts and find the lookup that exactly matches

this in codes and then add the code number ie 31 to accounts/code

I see the text being something like V lookup (the first entry in description ( say c2), match it exactly with codes ( in this case Description (say a2) and then pass the code ( say b2=31) to accounts\code ( say a2)

the problem i am having is the best i can get it to work only looks at similar entries and not the exact ones

I attach a spreadsheet

[#2]

Hi Robert,

That could be

=IFNA(INDEX(codes!$B$2:$B$1900,MATCH(1,INDEX(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(codes!$A$2:$A$1900,C2))*1,0,0),0)),"")

It returns zero if the code is not found, for example you have code for 

CARD PAYMENT TO TESCO STORES
but no code for
CARD PAYMENT TO TESCO STORE

Attached.

[#3]

That's excellent

Thanks so much
Rob