Categories

Where this works

Managing your categories is a web feature, and it needs the computer layout. Renaming a category, moving it to a different section, changing its icon or colour, and removing one are all done in the web app on a computer. That is why this page has no separate mobile section: there is one place to do this, and it is a computer.

The categories themselves are used everywhere. Putting a transaction in a category, and creating a new category from the budget, both work on a phone browser and in the Tovari mobile app.

Categorize everything, budget selectively

Tovari’s rule is that every transaction carries a category. Nothing sits blank waiting to be labelled, and nothing drops out of your reports because it was never filed.

That is not the same as budgeting. Categorizing is complete and happens for you; budgeting is a small, deliberate selection you make on top of it — a handful of categories you want to manage month to month. See Budget for that half.

Your categories are already yours

When your account was created, Tovari’s ready-made catalog was copied into your own categories. You did not adopt a shared list that Tovari continues to own: you got your own copy on day one, so from the very first transaction there was always somewhere sensible for it to go.

Because it is a copy, it is yours to shape:

Rename anything. “Groceries” can become “Food shop” without breaking anything that already points at it.
Move categories between sections, and create sections of your own.
Give a category a different icon or colour — the same one is then used everywhere that category appears.
Add categories the catalog never had, and remove ones you will never use.

Changes you make affect only your own household’s categories.

The Uncategorized fallback

Every household has a protected Uncategorized category. It is always there, it cannot be renamed away or deleted, and it is where a transaction lands when nothing could confidently place it. That is what makes “every transaction has a category” true rather than aspirational — Tovari would rather leave a row visibly waiting for you than guess at it.

You can also move a row into Uncategorized on purpose, when you want to come back to it.

Deleting a category does not lose transactions

When you delete a category, the transactions that were filed under it are moved to Uncategorized. They are not deleted, and they are not left pointing at nothing — they simply need re-filing, and they are easy to find because Uncategorized is where they now are.

Two related actions are worth telling apart:

Remove from budget takes a category out of your monthly envelopes. The category stays, with all its history; it just stops having a monthly amount. See Budget.
Delete removes the category itself, and moves its transactions to Uncategorized as above.

Where category management lives

Categories are managed from the Budget screen — that is where the whole list is, grouped into sections.

Adding a category

Press Budget a category in the budget header. The picker lists the categories you already have but are not budgeting, grouped by section and searchable, so the usual answer to “I need a category for this” is one that already exists. When it genuinely does not, create a new one from the same screen; you choose its name, its section, and its icon and colour.

Editing a category

Open a category from the budget screen to reach its editor. It carries the category’s identity — name, section, icon, colour, and whether it is one of your budgeted envelopes — and the two destructive actions described above. It autosaves; there is no Save button.

Sections

Sections are the headings your categories are grouped under, on the budget screen and in every category picker. You can add, rename and remove them, and move categories between them.

Budget — choosing which categories to manage actively, and what carries forward.
Categorizing spending — how Tovari decides which category a new transaction belongs in, and what it will never overwrite.
Transactions — changing a row’s category, one at a time or in bulk.
Payees — setting a default category for a payee.
Where each feature works — the platform map for every documented feature.