Categories and merchants

Every expense has a category, and can have a merchant. Both feed Insights, and both are filled in for you most of the time.

#Built-in categories

Food & drinks, Groceries, Transport, Lodging, Activities, Shopping, Bills, Home & DIY (hardware stores, furniture, repairs), Health, Pets, Subscriptions (streaming and apps), Personal care, Education, Culture (books, shows, concerts, instruments), Friends & family (birthdays, weddings, pocket money, babysitting), Taxes & fines (taxes, speeding and parking tickets, the tax office), Finance (bank fees, loans, savings, investing, cash withdrawals, transfers), Income (salary, refunds, top-ups), and Other for the rest. Every group, and Personal, has them.

#Your own categories

A group, and your Personal ledger, can add their own, for what the built-in ones miss: Rent, Kids, Car. For a group, from Settings, Categories; for Personal, from Categories in its header menu. Give one a name (up to 40 characters) and pick an icon. A name can't repeat another category of the group, built-in ones included, whatever its case.

Each category has its own colour, on its icon, in the filter and on the Insights bars: a fixed one for each built-in category, a colour derived from its id for a custom one, and a neutral grey for Other. The colours follow the account's theme.

Custom categories belong to their group, or to your Personal ledger; nobody else sees them. Deleting one files its expenses, repeating expenses and merchants under Other.

#Sorting what's under Other

Settings, Categories has Sort what's under Other. It files every expense still under Other using the description, the merchant's remembered category and the group's own categories. Expenses you filed by hand aren't touched.

In Personal, the same button on its Categories page also uses how you filed the same description before, ahead of the keywords, and marks savings and investing as set aside (see Personal expenses).

#The category guess

As you type what an expense was for, OpenCount suggests a category:

1. A custom category of the group whose name appears in the description wins: school trip for kids goes under your Kids category.
2. Otherwise, keywords in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese: dinner, resto, Lidl, courses, SNCF, Airbnb, loyer, croquettes, Leroy Merlin, YT premium, Apotheke, and many more. Accents, case and plurals (bières like bière) don't matter.
3. Nothing matched: the category stays as it is.

Picking a merchant suggests the category that merchant was last filed under, and falls back to the same guess on its name. Once you pick a category yourself, the guess stops touching it.

#Merchants

Where remembers merchants per group. Type a new name and it is saved with the expense; type it again in any case and it is the same merchant. The picker lists the group's merchants most used first, then most recent.

Each merchant remembers the category you last filed it under, so the second coffee at the same place needs no picking at all.