Skip to content
Open Net Worth Docs

Categories and payees

What this solves

Categories are what you spend on (Groceries, Rent, Software); payees are who you paid. A payee can carry a default category and renaming rules, so an imported line like “Grab* A-9BEIP3LGWFBJAV” is recognized as “Grab” automatically.

Manage categories

  1. Open Manage categories from Plan’s budget view (an account’s register only offers a quicker Add category for a new label on the spot).
  2. Add one: label, kind (income/expense/transfer/investment), and — for income — whether it’s taxable.
  3. Categories belong to a budget group; rename, recolor, hide, or remove from the same screen. Ids are opaque; the label is what you see and can rename freely.
  4. Removing a category doesn’t delete its transactions — they become “Unsorted.”

Manage payees

  1. Open Manage payees from an account’s register or a transaction’s Payee field.
  2. Set a default category so future transactions from that payee pre-categorize.
  3. Review aliases — raw statement text already routed here, learned from past imports — and remove one folded in by mistake.
  4. Add a renaming rule (contains, is, or regex) to route future imports before normalization.
  5. Merge duplicate payees (e.g. “Amazon” and “AMZN Mktp”), or hide one from the picker.
  6. Apply rules to history re-runs renaming rules across existing transactions — can overwrite a hand-set payee, so it asks for confirmation first.

What Lucius can do here

  • Create, rename, merge, or hide categories and payees; set a payee’s default category.
  • Add or remove aliases and renaming rules, and apply them across history.
  • Suggest a category for an uncategorized transaction from your own past patterns.

Things that trip people up

  • No “Uncategorized” category to assign — an unrecognized category name is rejected, never silently mapped to a catch-all.
  • A payee’s default category only applies going forward, not retroactively.
  • Names match exactly, not fuzzily — an ambiguous match errors, naming every candidate.
  • “Split” is a reserved, structural category for split bookkeeping only — not pickable.