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
• jsonlines - newline delimited json objects jsonlines
• 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 2024
• 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 built this out of curiosity about MCC codes.

Other folks (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. Convert the csv to an array of json objects on a single line php -f csv-to-json.php mcc_codes.csv mcc_codes.small.json
6. Convert the single line json to easier-to-read multiline array jq mcc_codes.small.json > mcc_codes.json
7. Convert the single line to a “jsonlines” formatted file: jq -c '.[]' mcc_codes.small.json > mcc_codes.jsonl

Step 5 depends on php-cli.
Steps 6 and 7 depend on jq.