Categories and rules

Settings → Categories (/reglages/categories) holds the tree your operations are filed under, and the rules that file them. It is also reachable at /categories, which redirects here.

The tree you start with

A new account is seeded with 19 top-level families and 87 subcategories: fourteen families of spending, three of income (Revenus, Revenus du patrimoine, Remboursements) and two that are neither, Épargne et placements and Mouvements internes.

Cheques, withdrawals and transfers file under Mouvements internes because they are means of payment rather than natures of spending, and putting money on a passbook is a move too, not an expense. Neither counts in your spending.

Category names are French, in every language

The seeded names are French literals and stay that way whatever language you read Badlen in: a category is your data, not the product’s wording, and it is displayed in the language it was created in. Rename any of them freely: rules follow the category, never its name.

There is no catch-all category. An operation filed nowhere is already the catch-all, and the breakdown and the budget both name that bucket.

Organization

The first card lists the tree. Unfold a family to see its subcategories, rename it, or add a subcategory to it. The search box above filters by name and counts the matches against the total.

Rules

The second card holds your own rules, applied before the built-in keywords. A rule is three things: a keyword, the category it files into, and a priority. A rule matches when the operation’s label contains the keyword, accents and case ignored; the highest priority wins, and two rules of equal priority are tried oldest first.

You can also create one without coming here: editing an operation offers Remember this merchant, which keeps the pattern you confirm and tells you how many other uncategorized operations it would catch.

Recategorize

The button does less than its name

Recategorize does not rewrite anything. It runs exactly the same pass as Categorize automatically on the operations page: it reads the operations that have no category and files what it recognises. An operation that already carries a category is never touched, even by a rule you have just written.

So a rule added today applies to what is still unfiled, and to everything that arrives afterwards, not retroactively to what you have already sorted. To refile something already categorized, change it on its own row in the ledger.

Deleting a category leaves the operations filed under it, which become uncategorized rather than disappearing, but it does take its own rules with it.