Categories
How PennyBolt groups where your money goes.
Categories are how PennyBolt groups your transactions for reporting. Assign a category to a transaction once — or let a payee rule do it automatically — and that transaction shows up in every relevant report.
Income vs. expense
Every category is either an income category or an expense category. This matters for reports: income flows in on the left side of the Sankey chart; expenses flow out on the right. The type also determines the sign convention in your net worth calculation.
PennyBolt ships with a set of default categories that covers most households. You can rename any of them, add your own, and delete ones you’ll never use.
The hierarchy
Categories form a two-level hierarchy: a parent category contains one or more subcategories.
For example:
Food & Drink
Groceries
Dining out
Coffee
When you look at a report, you can see spending by parent (“Food & Drink — $420”) or drill down by subcategory (“Groceries — $280, Dining out — $95, Coffee — $45”). You don’t have to use subcategories; a flat list of top-level categories works fine.
Transactions are assigned to the leaf — the most specific level. You can assign “Groceries” directly, or “Food & Drink” if you don’t want that detail.
Renaming categories
You can rename any category at any time. Existing transactions keep their category assignment; they just show the new name. Nothing in your history breaks.
To rename, right-click the category in the category list and choose Rename.
Adding and deleting categories
To add a category, click + at the bottom of the category list. Choose a parent category to make it a subcategory, or leave it at the top level.
To delete a category, right-click it and choose Delete. PennyBolt will ask what to do with existing transactions that use it: reassign them to another category, or leave them uncategorized.
See also
- Payee rules — assign categories automatically based on the payee.
- Reports: Sankey flow — see where your money goes by category.
- Transactions — each transaction carries one category (or a split across several).