Categories

What a category is

A category in SavingStat is the label that says what a payment was for: groceries, rent, a train ticket. It has a name and an emoji, and it can carry a colour, which is what makes a row readable at a glance in a long list and legible in a chart.

Categories sit on expenses. Income is grouped by source instead, which is a separate list with its own article.

Default categories and your own

You do not start from an empty list. Setup shows you a set of default categories, and you keep the ones that match how you spend; nothing is attached to your account when you sign up, only when you go through setup. Each default you keep is linked to your account rather than copied into it.

That link is what makes renaming a default safe. SavingStat stores your name and your emoji against your own link to the category and keeps the original name and emoji alongside them, so renaming one to Food shopping changes what you see without disturbing anything shared underneath.

You can also add your own. Give it a name and an emoji and it joins the same list, picked from and charted exactly like the rest, though two things still tell the two kinds apart. First, a budget's category list marks the defaults with a Default badge, so yours is visibly not one.

Second, renaming behaves differently. On a category you own, the new name is written to the category itself, not only to your link to it, so anyone who has taken that category into their own list sees your new name unless they have renamed it themselves. On a default, or on one you took from somebody else, only your own label moves.

Archiving instead of deleting

Archiving is the gentle way to retire a category. It drops out of the list you pick from and stops being suggested on imported rows, while every expense already filed under it keeps its label and reads exactly as it did before.

Deleting goes further. The category leaves your list, and your expenses that used it stay where they are but lose the label. The money is still recorded. It is simply filed under nothing. If you want a shorter picker rather than a gap in last year's breakdown, archive.

What becomes of the category underneath depends on who else has it. A category you made that nobody else has taken is removed outright. One you made that somebody else has taken into their own list is not removed at all: it passes to them and carries on as theirs, renamed with a note of who it came from if they already had one by that name. A default, or a category you took from somebody else, is untouched; only your link to it goes.

How a category differs from a budget

A category and a budget answer different questions. One transaction carries both. The category says what the money was for. The budget says which shared space it belongs to.

A grocery run can be labelled Groceries and sit inside a Household budget you share with someone. The two facts do not compete. Neither one replaces the other. A category is yours; a budget has an owner and members.