Categories organize your transactions into a hierarchical tree of expense and income types. Each transaction is assigned to a category so you can track where your money goes and where it comes from.
Categories are the foundation of budgeting in the Budget app. Every transaction belongs to a category, and categories are divided into two types:
- Expense categories -- money going out (groceries, rent, entertainment)
- Income categories -- money coming in (salary, freelance, dividends)
Categories can be nested to any depth, letting you organize spending as broadly or granularly as you need. For example, you might have a top-level Food category with children Groceries, Restaurants, and Coffee.
To create a new category:
- Navigate to Categories
- Click Add Category
- Fill in the details:
| Field | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Yes | Display name for the category |
| Type | Yes | Expense or Income |
| Parent | No | Place this category under an existing one |
| Icon | No | Emoji or icon to visually identify the category |
| Color | No | Color used in charts and reports |
Tip: Assign distinct colors to your top-level categories. Child categories inherit their parent's color in charts, so setting colors at the top level keeps your reports visually consistent.
Categories support unlimited nesting depth. Child categories roll up into their parent for reporting purposes -- when you view spending on Food, you see the combined total of Groceries, Restaurants, and any other children.
Common hierarchy patterns:
Housing
Rent / Mortgage
Utilities
Insurance
Maintenance
Food
Groceries
Restaurants
Coffee
Transportation
Fuel
Public Transit
Parking
Note: A category's type (expense or income) is determined by its top-level ancestor. All children under an expense category are expense categories; the same applies for income.
You can reorder categories by dragging them within the category tree:
- Reorder within the same level -- Drag a category up or down among its siblings to change the display order
- Move to a different parent -- Drag a category onto another category to make it a child of that category
- Promote to top level -- Drag a child category to the root level to make it a top-level category
Changes are saved automatically as you drop.
When you first set up the Budget app, the Setup Wizard offers to create a default set of categories based on the 50/30/20 budgeting rule:
Needs (50%)
- Housing
- Food
- Transportation
- Healthcare
- Subscriptions
Wants (30%)
- Entertainment
- Shopping
- Personal
Savings (20%)
- Savings
Income
- Salary
- Freelance
- Investments
- Other Income
Tip: The defaults are a starting point. Rename, reorganize, or delete them to match your actual spending patterns. You can always create new categories later.
Click any category to open its detail view, which shows:
- Total spending -- Lifetime total for this category
- Average -- Average monthly spending
- This month -- Spending in the current month
- Trend -- Whether spending is increasing, decreasing, or stable compared to recent months
- Monthly spending chart -- A bar chart showing spending over time
- Recent transactions -- The most recent transactions assigned to this category
This view helps you quickly understand your spending patterns for any category without navigating to the full reports.
To delete a category, open it and click Delete.
Warning: You cannot delete a category that has transactions assigned to it. Reassign or delete those transactions first, then delete the category.
When you delete a parent category, all of its child categories are also deleted (cascade delete). Make sure none of the children have transactions assigned before deleting a parent.
Tip: If you want to stop using a category without deleting it, consider moving it under a "Retired" parent category instead. This preserves your historical data while keeping your active category list clean.
Each category in the tree displays a count of how many transactions are assigned to it. This count includes only direct transactions -- it does not roll up transactions from child categories.
The count helps you quickly identify:
- Categories that are heavily used and might benefit from being split into subcategories
- Categories with zero transactions that could be cleaned up or removed
- Budget -- Set monthly spending targets for each category
- Tags -- Add additional classification dimensions to categories with tag sets
- Transactions -- Assign categories to individual transactions
- Import Rules -- Automatically categorize imported transactions based on patterns
There are no dedicated settings for categories. Category behavior is managed directly through the category tree interface.