Categories

You can manage your categories in the budget page. Actual supports both expense and income categories.

To rename or delete a category:

1. Hover over the category and press the down arrow
2. Select Rename or Delete from the menu

Categories are organized into groups and same actions can be performanced on groups.

To add a category:

1. Hover over the category group and press the down arrow
2. Select Add category

To add a category group:

1. Press the Add Group button below the expense categories
2. Type in a name and press
   Enter

Only one income group can ever exist and it cannot be deleted.

Tips for new users

If you don't have much experience tracking your finances yet, we recommend starting simple. For this reason, Actual only comes with a few basic categories by default. Don't worry about tracking things super closely. Tracking a few basic areas of your life will still give you profound insights on your spending.

The basic categories are:

• Food: all grocery and restaurant spending.
• General: everything else (you probably want to split this up over time, but having a general category is nice for a lot of miscellaneous expenses).
• Bills: all bills that charge that same amount each month. Some people like to split this up too, but we think reports will eventually make this clearer.
• Bills (Flexible): All bills that charge various amounts (power, water, bi-monthly bills, etc).
• Savings: any transfers to savings accounts. These are treated as expenses because it's moving money out of the budget, but if you add your savings account on the budget you'll want to budget all that money accordingly instead.