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Categorizing spending

Step 6 of the Quick start. You can read your register. Now make it mean something.

Categorize everything, budget selectively

Section titled “Categorize everything, budget selectively”

Tovari’s rule is that every transaction carries a category. There is a protected Uncategorized category in every household, and a transaction that no rule could place lands there rather than being left blank. Nothing falls out of your reports because it was never labelled.

That is separate from budgeting. Categorizing is complete and automatic; budgeting is a deliberate, small selection you make on top of it — see your first envelope.

What Tovari does for you

Section titled “What Tovari does for you”

Your household adopted the whole category catalog at sign-up, so there is always somewhere for a transaction to go. When a row arrives — from a bank connection or a file import — Tovari works down a fixed order of signals to place it:

  1. A default you have set yourself on the payee. This beats everything.
  2. What the bank’s own description says about the kind of payment it is — a card payment or a transfer looks like one in the description even when the merchant name suggests otherwise.
  3. Defaults Tovari has learned for that payee.
  4. Its merchant dictionary, matched against the raw bank text.

If none of those answers confidently, the row lands in Uncategorized and waits for you. Tovari would rather leave a row for you than guess.

There is one extra check on every automatic answer: money coming in is never automatically filed under a spending category, and money going out is never automatically filed under an income category. (Credit cards and loans are exempt, because on a liability account the signs run the other way.)

What you set is never overwritten

Section titled “What you set is never overwritten”

This is the promise the automation is built around: a field you have edited yourself is never reprocessed. If you recategorize a row, later automatic passes skip that row’s category — including bulk recategorization and the periodic sweep that re-runs improved rules over old transactions. If you rename a payee, the same protection applies to the name.

The two protections are independent: a row whose payee you fixed can still have its category improved automatically, and vice versa.

Payee defaults follow the same principle. A default you chose for a payee is frozen; ones Tovari worked out for itself can be improved later.

Transfers are not spending

Section titled “Transfers are not spending”

Money moving between two of your own accounts is a transfer, and Tovari excludes it from spending and income by the link between the two sides, never by which category it carries. So paying your credit card from checking never inflates your spending — it just moves the money.

Change one row’s category

Section titled “Change one row’s category”
  1. Open the register and click the Category cell on the row.
  2. A dropdown opens with a Search categories box. Type to narrow, then pick one. The list includes Uncategorized at the top so you can deliberately put a row back.

The payee works the same way, in the Payee column, and offers to create a payee on the fly if you type a name that does not exist yet.

Change many rows at once

Section titled “Change many rows at once”

Select rows with their checkboxes. A bar appears at the bottom with a Categorize or transfer picker; choose a category to apply it to the whole selection, or Clear Selection to start over.

Rows you have already categorized by hand are deliberately left alone by the automatic passes, so a later sweep will not undo the work you do here.

Where you are now

Section titled “Where you are now”

Your register reads correctly: every row has a payee and a category, and the ones you fixed will stay fixed. Now pick the few you want to actively budget: your first envelope.