Managing Categories
Categories allow you to categorise your transactions into different buckets so you can easily see where your income and expenses are coming from or going. Although Angelfish attempts to automatically categorise your transactions as much as possible, from time to time you may need to manually correct or add a category to your transactions so you get accurate reports.
Angelfish comes with an initial detailed list of categories which should cover most households, but you can easily add, remove or modify categories on the Categories Settings page under your household settings.
Category Groups & Categories
Category Groups allow you to group categories together into one bucket. For example, you may have expense categories such as Rent, Electricity and Water, but combined they all add up to the cost of you living in your home. Angelfish allows you to group these together so you can see a detailed breakdown of your transactions when viewing reports, but also group them together into major areas of your income and expenses such as Home, Car, Transportation, Leisure etc.
Angelfish only supports Category Groups and Categories. You cannot create sub-categories of Categories, that’s what Groups are for!
Category Types
Angelfish is unique in that it allows you to also set a Type for each of the categories you have. This allows Angelfish to better understand things such as is the income earned or passive, are expenses critical or optional, so you can get a better view of your finances. Below is an overview of the different types of category you can set when creating or editing a category:
Income Category Types
| Type |
Description |
| Earned |
Earned income is income you receive from working, through a job or self-employed business. Any income you receive from trading your time or expertise for money is earned income. If you stopped working tomorrow, the earned income would stop too. |
| Passive |
Passive income is income you receive from your investments and assets. Any income you received that would continue even if you stopped working tomorrow should be typed as Passive. |
| Other |
Sometimes you will receive gifts, credit card reward cashback and other income which is not part of your financial plan. For any category of income that is adhoc or gifted, it should be typed as Other. |
Expense Category Types
| Type |
Description |
| Critical |
Critical expenses are expenses that you cannot cut back on. Things like rent, food, electricity fall into this category as you need these expenses to keep a roof over your head, stay warm and live. When you report on your monthly spending, your critical expenses total will be the bare minimum income you need to make each month just to live. |
| Important |
Important expenses are expenses you could cut back on in the worst case scenario, but you would probably not cut or can cut immediately. For example, private schools may be an expense that falls into this category, where you’re obligated to pay the rest of the year regardless of whether you choose to pull your kid out or not. If you own a car you may need to service the car from time to time to keep it running. Things like this are important to maintain your current lifestyle, but not as essential as the critical expenses you need to maintain just to live. |
| Optional |
Optional expenses are where all the fun in life belong. Holidays, dining out, sports and personal care are all examples of optional expenses that make up your lifestyle, but in the worst case scenario could be pulled back if you needed to. |
| Investment |
Your investments will sometimes have some expenses to maintain them, and any category related to these costs should be of type Investment. Things like lawyers, maintainance, mortgages on rental properties etc. should go in this category type. The good news is at the end of the year you should be able to take any expenses of type Investment and use them to get tax deductions against your investment income so you can use this type to keep track of them for your tax returns! |
Creating or Editing Category Groups
When creating or editing a category group, you will have the following options in Angelfish:
- Name: The name of the Category Group
- Description: An optional description about the types of categories that belong to this Category Group.
- Category Group Type: This can either be
Income or Expenses. All categories created within this group will be of that type.
- Color: An optional color selector if you want to ensure the category group is shown on report graphs as a certain color. If none is selected a random color will be selected for the Category Group and all Categories within it when rendering reports.
- Icon: An emoji icon for the Group. All Categories created under the Category Group will inherit this emoji icon when they’re created unless you override it. Emoji icons help visually identify Categories when viewing transactions on the Accounts or Reports pages.
Removing a Category Group
If you decide you no longer need a Category Group, you will be able to remove it from the top menu. Any Categories within the group will need to be moved to another Category Group first before the removal can succeed. If you want to remove all the Categories for a Category Group at the same time, please refer to removing a Category below.
Creating or Editing Categories
When creating or editing a category within a category group, you will have the following options in Angelfish:
- Name: The name of the Category
- Description: An optional description about the category and what type of transactions it should include. The description will also be searchable when finding categories on the Accounts page and also pop up when selecting a category so other users can understand what the category should be used for when categorising transactions in their Accounts.
- Group: The Category Group the category should belong too. If you want to change the category group a category belongs too, select the new category using the dropdown for this field.
- Icon: An emoji icon for the Category. By default it will use the Group’s emoji icon, but you can easily select a new one using the emoji picker.
- Type: The type of Income or Expense the category is, based on the descriptions above.
Removing a Category
You can easily remove a category that is no longer needed. However when removing the category it will show you how many transactions are using the category, and if there are any make you choose a new category to re-assign all the transactions too so they don’t get left uncategorised in your reports.