Categories: the taxonomy behind your reports

Every budget, spending report and insight is built from categories. A little care here pays off everywhere.

How categories are structured

Categories come in two types, Expense and Income, and the hierarchy is exactly two levels deep: a parent, and its children. Parents are folders; the transactions live in the children. That two-level limit is a feature, not a shortcut. Deep trees look organised and report terribly.

You start with around 150 categories under two dozen groups, from Food & Dining to Subscriptions to four income groups. Treat the set as scaffolding: rename what jars, delete what you will never use, add what is missing. A taxonomy you recognise at a glance is worth more than a complete one.

Need, Want, and where Savings comes from

Each expense category carries a Classification of Need or Want. This single radio button drives the Needs, Wants, Savings view (a card on the Budget page, echoed as Spending Ratios in the Budget vs Actuals report), and the arithmetic has a consequence worth understanding: Savings is not a category you assign, it is what remains. Income minus needs minus wants equals savings.

Unclassified spending inflates your savings figure

Any expense that reaches neither the Need nor the Want bucket is left out of the subtraction entirely, so it quietly inflates the savings residual. If the Needs, Wants, Savings view shows suspiciously high savings, the usual culprit is not thrift but unclassified categories. Sweep through the Expense table on the Categories page and give everything a classification; the view discloses the unclassified total underneath for exactly this reason.

Creating and editing

Add Category on the Categories page opens a dialog with a Name, Type, Classification (expense only), and an optional Parent Category. Income categories get a Taxable switch instead, which feeds the taxable income report. Two rules surface as you edit:

A category's type locks once it has subcategories. To change it, remove or reassign the children first.
Parents cannot hold transactions directly. If you give a child to a category that already has its own transactions, Endute asks for confirmation and then moves those transactions into a new child named {Parent} - General, so nothing is lost and the folder rule stays intact.

What deleting really does

Deleting a category does not delete its transactions. They stay exactly where they are and become uncategorised, ready to be reassigned. Budgets set for the category are removed with it. Parents with subcategories cannot be deleted from the page; remove or reassign the children first. And one hard block: a category used in a loan account's Payment extras cannot be deleted until it is removed from that loan's configuration.

A practical tidy-up flow for merging two overlapping categories, since there is no one-click merge: reassign the transactions of the loser to the keeper from the transaction list, then delete the empty category.

What next

Categories power budgets directly, so the natural follow-on is Budgeting in Endute 101. And since most categorisation happens automatically at import, the payees guide next door explains where those suggestions come from.