Help / Categories

The category detail page

Click a category in the Categories list and you drill into its detail page — a chart of monthly totals followed by every transaction assigned to the category. Click a group heading instead and you get the group-level version: the same chart, aggregated across all categories in that group.

The monthly chart

At the top of the page is a bar chart with one bar per month. The y-axis is the total spent (or earned, for income) in that month. For a category page, the data is just that category's transactions. For a group page, it's the sum across all categories in the group.

Use the chart to answer questions like:

  • "Is this category trending up or down?"
  • "Did last month's spike in Dining actually happen or am I imagining it?"
  • "What's my typical monthly spend on Groceries?"

The transactions list

Below the chart is a transactions table, similar to the one on an account. The key differences:

  • Transactions here come from every account, not just one. You're looking at a category cross-section.
  • It's read-only in the sense that you can't inline-edit amounts or payees here. If you want to change a transaction, click through to its account.
  • The list is grouped by month, with a summary row at the top of each month showing that month's total. Those summary rows are styled differently from the detail rows and don't have a checkbox column.

Columns

  • Date — the transaction's posting date.
  • Payee — who was paid.
  • Category — (group view only) the specific subcategory, so you can see which category within the group the transaction was in.
  • Account — which account the transaction came from.
  • Amount — signed.

Back to the Categories list

Use the browser's back button or click Categories in the sidebar to return. LedgerBear remembers your scroll position, so if you clicked in to a category 800 rows down the list, you'll land back roughly where you were.

If the list is empty

A paragraph at the top tells you there are no transactions in this category yet. That usually means one of three things:

  • You just created the category and haven't assigned anything to it.
  • The category is only referenced by a rule that hasn't fired on any import yet.
  • Everything that used to be in this category has since been reassigned.