Categories

A Category is what a transaction is for — Groceries, Rent, Dining Out. Categories form a tree: broad parents like Food can hold narrower children like Groceries and Dining Out, so you can report at whichever level makes sense — the whole tree, or just one branch of it.

Every transaction can be assigned a category. That single assignment is what lets finzu answer “where’s my money going?” — it’s the same transaction data from your Ledger, just grouped by what it was for instead of listed in date order.

Why a tree, not a flat list

Spending doesn’t naturally sit at one level of detail. Some months you want to know “how much went to Food” overall; other times you want the split between Groceries and Dining Out specifically. A tree lets both questions use the same categories — you’re not forced to pick one granularity up front and lose the other.

For example, Expenses → Bills & Utilities → Insurance reports at any of three levels: total expenses, just bills and utilities, or insurance alone — the same transactions, three different views.

Making a category stand out

By default, most categories fold into a generic income/expense split on the dashboard’s trend chart. Turn on Plot separately for a category — Rent, say, or a loan EMI — and it gets its own line, tracked over time instead of blended in. Useful for the handful of categories you actually watch closely, regardless of where they sit in the tree.

Next: labels that cut across categories entirely.