mcc-codes

A public repository of Merchant Category Codes (MCC) in formats easier to read than most places (i.e. not a PDF).

The same data is available in several formats:

• csv
• small json - no whitespace characters
• formatted json - indented for legibility
• ods (LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org compatible)
• xls (Microsoft Office & useful with many other systems that can read xls)

Fields

• Derived MCC - mcc
• edited_description - manually edited, modern text
• combined_description - uses either USDA or IRS
• usda_description - Description from the USDA
• irs_description - Description from IRS
• irs_reportable - Reportable under 6041/6041A and Authority for Exception

Future plans and workflow

I hope that folks will create pull requests to make this information easier to read and use. Specifically, the "Edited Description" field is a place where we can collaboratively go through and fix things like upper case vs. title case.

Preferences for the "Edited Description":

• Shorter is better
• Use descriptions that make the most sense to someone in 2014
• Use title case

If the pull request is against the CSV I'll gladly update the binary formats. Or see below for how to update everything in one shot.

Credits

I'm building this to benefit the operations and users of https://www.card.com

We may add more data to this at some point and will share updates. Others (e.g. Expensify) are contributing fixes too. Thanks!

Updating the files

1. Start with a csv file that is in a good state.
2. Open it with LibreOffice using only commas as field separators.
3. "Save as" to ods.
4. "Save as" to xls.
5. php -f csv-to-json.php mcc_codes.csv mcc_codes.small.json
6. cat mcc_codes.small.json | json > mcc_codes.json

Step 5 assumes a working php-cli. Step 6 assumes a working node.js & "json"