Categories
Categories are how FinNudge groups transactions for budgeting and analytics. The Categories page is where you tune your taxonomy: add, rename, recolor, and re-emoji every bucket.
Default categories
New accounts ship with a curated set (Food, Transport, Bills, Subscriptions, Travel, Entertainment, Shopping, Health, Income, etc.). They map cleanly to Plaid's personal-finance categories so auto-classification works out of the box.
Custom categories & subcategories
Click Add in the header to create a top-level category. Click the + on any row to add a subcategory under it. You can nest 3 levels deep, e.g. Food → Restaurants → Coffee shops.
Picking emojis
Each category has an emoji that shows up in transaction pills, dashboard cards, and nudges. Click the emoji button in the edit row to open the picker. Curated tabs cover Goals, Money, Bills, Food, Fun, Travel, Home, Pets, and Health. Subcategories get their own emoji too.
Picking a color
Eleven curated colors keep charts readable. Subcategories inherit their parent's color for consistency in the donut and stacked views.
Inline budgets
Click any budget number to edit it in place. Hit Enter to save. Setting a budget on a parent category caps the parent and all its children combined.
Auto-categorization rules
When you re-categorize a transaction, FinNudge offers to remember the change. Rules match in this order, highest priority first:
- Exact: "Netflix" matches only "Netflix".
- Starts with: "Amazon" matches "Amazon Prime", "Amazon Web Services".
- Contains: "coffee" matches anything with "coffee" in the name.
Rules run before AI suggests a category, so they always win.
Deleting categories
Default categories can't be deleted, but you can rename and re-emoji them. Custom categories are deletable. Transactions assigned to a deleted category fall back to Other and can be re-categorized at any time.
Income vs spending
FinNudge auto-recognizes income categories (Income, Salary, Refund, Paycheck, Transfer, Freelance, Interest) and excludes them from spending dashboards and budget pacing. They still show up in Cash Flow and net worth math.