Categories¶
Categories describe what your transactions mean. They let you group spending and income into named buckets — Groceries, Salary, Utilities — so Tally Up can show you patterns and measure your budget performance.
How categories work¶
Categories are global — they are shared across all your plans, not tied to a specific plan. Any category you create is available everywhere in the app.
Categories are hierarchical. You can create parent categories with child categories underneath them. For example:
Living Costs
├── Groceries
├── Utilities
└── Transport
A category at any level can be applied to a transaction. Parent and child categories are independent — you can budget at whichever level makes sense for you.
Every category has a type: either Income or Expense. The type determines how Tally Up treats the category in budget reporting.
Managing categories¶
Go to Settings → Categories to view, create, edit, and delete categories.
Creating a category¶
Tap Add and fill in:
- Name — the display name (e.g.
Groceries) - Type — Income or Expense
- Parent — optional; choose a parent to nest this category under another
Editing a category¶
Tap any category to edit its name, type, or parent. Changes apply immediately across all transactions that use it.
Deleting a category¶
Swipe to delete. Transactions that used the deleted category become uncategorised.
Automatic categories¶
When you import transactions via QIF, Tally Up reads the category labels in the file and creates matching categories automatically. This saves manual setup if you are migrating from another finance app.
Tally Up's auto-categorisation engine also assigns categories to new transactions based on your Category Rules. See Category Rules for details.
Tips¶
- Keep your top-level categories broad and use children for detail. Deep trees are harder to maintain.
- The type (Income vs Expense) matters for budgeting — make sure it matches how you use the category.
- Categories created during QIF import default to Expense if the type cannot be inferred from the file.