5. Categories
Categories let you classify transactions so statistics, budgets, and exports can group them meaningfully.
Income and expense categories
Every category has a type:
- Income — salary, gift, interest, sale, etc.
- Expense — groceries, housing, transport, leisure, etc.
The new-transaction form only offers categories that match the chosen transaction type (Income / Expense).
System categories
When you create a workspace, a default set of categories is generated automatically (from YAML templates). These are system categories: they cannot be deleted and generally cannot be renamed, so every workspace starts from the same baseline as defined in the templates.
This also includes the internal Deleted category placeholder used for safe category removal. It cannot be selected for new transactions or budgets, and it cannot be deleted.
You can freely add, rename, and delete your own categories.
Flat category structure
Categories are currently single-level only. There is no parent / sub-category hierarchy in the app.
If you need a finer breakdown inside the same category, use tags for that purpose. Multi-level classification belongs there, not in the category tree.
The Categories page is split into income and expense groups.
Creating a category
In the + New category form:
- Name — the displayed label.
- Type — Income or Expense.
- Icon — picked from a grouped icon set (food, housing, education, …). The icon appears in lists and on budget cards.
- Color — a hex value; the chip uses it as background, and a contrasting text color (light or dark) is chosen automatically using YIQ luminance.
- Sort order — siblings are ordered by this number.
Deletion
Deleting a custom category does not delete the transactions, recurring transactions, or budgets that reference it. Instead, the system automatically reassigns those records to the internal Deleted category system category of the same type, so historical data stays intact.
System categories cannot be deleted.