Categories

What a category is

A category is the label that answers what was this 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.

Defaults 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. Your name and your emoji are stored against your own link to it, while the category's original name and emoji are kept 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. Two things still tell the two kinds apart. A budget's category list marks the defaults with a Default badge, so yours is visibly not one.

The other is renaming. 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 offered as a suggestion 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 no longer filed under anything. If what you want is 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. One 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 one you took from somebody else, is untouched, and only your link to it goes.

How this differs from a budget

A category and a budget answer different questions, and 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, and neither one replaces the other. A category is yours; a budget has an owner and members.