Categories and tags
Organise items by type with categories and follow projects or plans across them with tags.
On this page
Categories and tags organise the same items for different questions. Categories describe the kind of income or spending; tags connect payments that belong to one plan or project. Choosing the right one early keeps the budget easy to navigate later.
Which is which
A category answers: what kind of spending is this? Housing, Groceries, Insurance, Mobility. Every item has exactly one, or none. Categories are few, they are permanent, and they are what the analysis screen divides your spending by. A new account starts with nine.
A tag answers: what does this belong to? A trip, a move, a renovation, a hobby. An item can carry several, or none, and a tag cuts across categories on purpose — a holiday is flights and insurance and a rental car, which are three different kinds of spending that are one thing to you.
The test, when you are unsure: if you would still be using the label in five years, it is a category. If it names something with a beginning and an end, or a project you are keeping an eye on, it is a tag.
Categories in practice
Each has a name, a colour, and whether it is used for expense, income or both. The colour is what identifies it in every chart, and the nine that come with a new account already have colours chosen so that neighbouring ones stay apart for colour-blind readers — worth keeping in mind before picking new ones by eye.
Archiving a category keeps it and its history but takes it out of the pickers, which is what you want for something you no longer use but still have past items in.
Deleting a category does not delete its items. They stay in the budget and become uncategorised. Review that list afterwards if you want to assign them to another category.
You can have up to 100.
Tags in practice
Tags are typed onto an item, not created first. Type Summer trip in the tag
field of two items and the tag exists on both.
They are normalised as they are saved: lower-cased, and anything that is
not a letter or a digit becomes a hyphen. Summer Trip, summer trip and
SUMMER--TRIP all become summer-trip, so you cannot accidentally create
three tags for one holiday. Accented letters survive intact. The field shows
what your text will become while you type it.
Filtering by tags is and, not or: select two and you see the items carrying both.
Tag budgets, and what a period means
A tag can carry a target amount, and this is where the one genuinely counter-intuitive setting lives — the period:
| Period | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Total | The whole cost of the thing, over its whole life. For something finite: a holiday, a renovation. |
| Per month | An allowance. For something open-ended: a gym, a hobby. |
| Per year | The same, over a year. Concert tickets, courses. |
| Rolling 12 months | The next twelve months from today, moving forward. |
Two of these behave in ways worth knowing before you rely on them.
Total excludes open-ended items. It has to: an item with no end date has no total, so a lifetime figure that included a €40-a-month gym membership would be infinite, or arbitrary. If a tag with a total budget seems to be reporting less than you expected, check whether something under it never ends.
Rolling 12 months looks forward, not back. It is the next twelve months, not the last twelve. That makes it a planning figure — “am I about to commit more than I meant to” — rather than a report on what you did.
A tag is shown as finished when nothing under it is open-ended and its last payment is in the past. Being paused does not count as finished.
Where to set them
Categories and tags both live under Settings → Categories & tags, where you can rename, recolour and set budgets in one place. Each also has a page of its own — reachable by pressing the pencil, or by clicking a tag anywhere — showing everything filed under it, broken down two ways.