Ron,
This was extremely helpful and should suit my needs. It took me a
little while to try this out because I'm still a novice at advanced
Excel functionality. VLOOKUP solves my problem nicely. I'm going to
have to experiment with the lookup table values to see how much of a
task it will be to maintain it. My mock example is really simple but
the acutal vendor descriptions in my bank statements may make
categorizing tricky, due to slight variations on similarly named items.
As long as my table can default to an "OTHER" category for exceptions,
managing this task should be doable.

My next step is creating macro(s) that will intelligently set up the
above upon importing my statement data.

Thanks,
Joe