A category is what turns a list of payments into an answer to “where does my money go”. Every transaction can carry one, and nothing breaks if it does not.
Where the category comes from
It depends on how the transaction arrived.
- From a bank Finthy syncs (the United States and Canada, through Plaid), the data provider reports its own category and Finthy maps it onto a Finthy category. Groceries and restaurants become dining, a shop becomes shopping, rent and bills become utilities, and so on. When the provider gives nothing usable, Finthy falls back to keywords in the transaction description.
- From a statement you import, the AI that reads the file assigns the category along with the amount and date.
- From a transaction you enter yourself, you pick it. Category is optional, so you can leave it and set it later.
Why a category is sometimes wrong
The provider works with a small set of broad categories, around sixteen at the top level, and real spending does not divide that neatly. A hardware shop and a supermarket can arrive under the same heading. A payment to a person has no merchant to recognise at all. Where the description is the only clue, a keyword match is a reasonable guess rather than a fact.
So treat the first category as a starting point. It is right often enough to be useful and wrong often enough that it is worth a look.
Changing it
Open the transaction and change its category. That is immediate, and it applies to that transaction.
Finthy does not learn from the change. It will not find similar transactions, and it will not categorise future ones differently because of it. If the same payment arrives every month under the wrong category, each one needs changing. This is worth knowing before you assume a correction will hold.
For more than a few at once, select them in the transaction list and use the bulk actions to set a category on all of them in one step. Bulk transaction actions are part of the paid plans.
Creating your own categories is also part of the paid plans. On the free plan you work with Finthy’s built-in set.
Where to see spending grouped by category
- The Cashflow page has an Income Breakdown and an Expense Breakdown by category for the period you choose, and choosing a category filters the transaction list below.
- The Trends page has Category Trends, the same grouping across time, for the categories you select.
- The Category Analysis export in Settings gives you the breakdown as a file, with statistics and percentages.
All three are part of the paid plans. On the free plan you can still set and change categories on every transaction; it is the analysis built on top of them that is paid.
Good to know
- Uncategorised is a real state, not an error. In reports those transactions group as
uncategorised, and in an export they read
uncategorized_incomeoruncategorized_expenserather than being left blank. - A category is not a currency or an account. Changing it never moves money, never changes a balance, and never changes which account a transaction belongs to.
- Duplicates are excluded from category breakdowns, so a payment you marked as a duplicate will not double a category’s total.