How categories are organized

Every category in LedgerBear has three parts: a type, a group, and a name. Together they form a display label like Expense › Food & Dining › Groceries. This page explains what each part is for.

Type: Expense, Income, or Investment

The type determines where the category shows up in reports:

• Expense — money going out for things you consume. The default.
• Income — money coming in. Paychecks, interest, refunds.
• Investment — money going out that you still own: contributions to a brokerage or retirement account, purchases of stocks, savings sweeps you want tracked separately from ordinary expenses.

On the Cashflow dashboard, Income, Investments, and Expenses each get their own column so you can see them separately.

You can't change a category's type after you create it. If you miscategorized something as Expense that should be Investment, create the correct one and reassign transactions to it.

Group: the bucket

The group is a heading that several related categories share. Examples:

• Food & Dining — with subcategories like Groceries, Restaurants, Coffee.
• Utilities — with Electric, Gas, Water, Internet.
• Transportation — with Gas, Parking, Public Transit.

Groups show up as headers in the Categories list and on the Cashflow dashboard. You can pick an existing group from an autocomplete when you create a category, or type a new one to start a new group.

Groups are 2–32 characters. Renaming a group is an explicit action — see Creating, editing, and deleting categories.

Name: the specific category

The name is the leaf label — the specific thing, within the group. Names are 2–64 characters and should be unique within a group (you can have Food & Dining > Groceries and Business > Groceries, but not two different Groceries entries inside Food & Dining).

How granular should I make them?

That's up to you. Two extremes, both valid:

• Coarse — one category per group (Food & Dining > Food & Dining, Utilities > Utilities). Less work, but harder to slice. Good if you mostly care about top-level budgets.
• Fine — one category per specific purpose (Food & Dining > Groceries, Food & Dining > Restaurants, Food & Dining > Coffee). More to maintain, but lets you ask questions like "how much did I spend on coffee last year?"

The nice thing about LedgerBear's group/name split is you can start coarse and get finer later by splitting an existing category into several — just create the new ones and reassign transactions.

Unassigned transactions

A transaction without a category is "uncategorized". Uncategorized transactions still count in the overall Income/Expenses totals (based on the sign of their amount) but don't show up on any category's detail page. It's fine to leave odds and ends uncategorized if you're not going to look at them.