Categories

A category is a label on a transaction — “Groceries,” “Rent,” “Dining Out.” That’s all it is: a way to group spending for reporting and budgeting. It has no effect on your net worth, your account balances, or whether a transaction is valid.

Categorizing is optional, and that’s permanent

Leave a transaction’s category blank and it shows as Unsorted — a real, permanent, first-class state, not a nag to fix later. There’s no “uncategorized” catch-all sitting in your category list waiting to be renamed; a blank category is just blank. Never categorize anything and the app still works — accounts, net worth, and the ledger are all complete without it. Categories exist for when you want spending broken down, not because the app needs them.

Categories have names and stable ids

Every category has a human-readable label (“Groceries”) and, underneath it, an opaque id used internally. You never need to think about the id — refer to a category by its label whether typing, searching, or asking Lucius to recategorize something. The stable id is what lets you rename “Dining” to “Restaurants” later without breaking every transaction and report that already used it.

What happens with an unknown category

Save a transaction with a category that doesn’t exist — yours, an automation’s, or Lucius’s — and the write is refused with an error rather than silently invented. A typo’d name never quietly becomes a new, permanent category by accident. Categories are created deliberately, by you or Lucius on your behalf.

How a transaction gets its category

A transaction’s category is decided in a fixed order: whatever you explicitly set, then the payee’s default category if it has one, otherwise blank. Naming a payee once (e.g. “Trader Joe’s” always means Groceries) saves you from re-categorizing the same recurring spend every time.

Categories vs. envelopes

A category is just a label; it doesn’t hold a budget of its own. The concept that actually holds money is an envelope — categories and envelopes are deliberately separate ideas, linked together. See Envelopes and budgeting for why that split exists and what it means for your spending against your budget.