# Multi-category budgets (or exclude categories from total budget)

**URL:** <https://community.emma-app.com/t/multi-category-budgets-or-exclude-categories-from-total-budget/5985>\
**Category:** Feedback & Ideas\
**Created:** [December 23, 2022, 2:18pm UTC](https://community.emma-app.com/t/multi-category-budgets-or-exclude-categories-from-total-budget/5985 "2022-12-23T14:18:27Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![niczap](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/community.emma-app.com/niczap/32/2098_2.png) [@niczap](https://community.emma-app.com/u/niczap)\
**Post date:** [December 23, 2022, 2:18pm UTC](https://community.emma-app.com/t/multi-category-budgets-or-exclude-categories-from-total-budget/5985/1 "2022-12-23T14:18:28Z")

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I want to focus my budgeting on things I have day-to-day control over. I have no day-to-day control over housing costs, bills, repairs, maintenance, and repeating costs I’m committed to (e.g. gym membership, haircuts). I do have control over eating out, groceries, entertainment, and shopping. It adds unnecessary complexity to manage this day-to-day spending in four separate category budgets. I just want a single “discretionary spending” budget. At the same time it’s useful to break down these categories in the spending analysis (e.g. how much am I burning on eating out?) so I don’t want to abolish these categories.

I can see two possible solutions:

1. Multi-category budgets (same as Money Dashboard)

or

1. Exclude categories from the “total” budget. I know I can exclude things from the total _spending_, but I don’t want to do this as I still need to keep an eye on overall spending.

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**Author:** ![Connor](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/community.emma-app.com/connor/32/2104_2.png) [@Connor](https://community.emma-app.com/u/Connor)\
**Post date:** [December 30, 2022, 10:55am UTC](https://community.emma-app.com/t/multi-category-budgets-or-exclude-categories-from-total-budget/5985/2 "2022-12-30T10:55:09Z")

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Hey @niczap,

This is an interesting idea!

How do the Multi-category budgets work? Do you have a main category and then sub-categories within those?

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**Author:** ![niczap](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/community.emma-app.com/niczap/32/2098_2.png) [@niczap](https://community.emma-app.com/u/niczap)\
**Post date:** [January 1, 2023, 9:58am UTC](https://community.emma-app.com/t/multi-category-budgets-or-exclude-categories-from-total-budget/5985/3 "2023-01-01T09:58:24Z")

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Hi @Connor

No there’s all included categories have the same status within the budget. For example, I might set up a “luxuries” budget and include “eating out”, “shopping” and “entertainment”

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**Author:** ![JIMMWX](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f17d59/32.png) [@JIMMWX](https://community.emma-app.com/u/JIMMWX)\
**Post date:** [January 3, 2023, 10:37pm UTC](https://community.emma-app.com/t/multi-category-budgets-or-exclude-categories-from-total-budget/5985/4 "2023-01-03T22:37:14Z")

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Just adding my voice to this request. It would be great to exclude bills from my budget but still show them in overall spending.

This way I can see how I’m doing month to month generally and how my discretionary spend is going.

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**Author:** ![ggavena](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/51bf81/32.png) [@ggavena](https://community.emma-app.com/u/ggavena)\
**Post date:** [May 31, 2023, 3:55am UTC](https://community.emma-app.com/t/multi-category-budgets-or-exclude-categories-from-total-budget/5985/5 "2023-05-31T03:55:33Z")

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Just wanted to add a +1 to this request.

Being able to exclude specific categories from analytics and budget would be super useful to me. Right now I have to use the excluded category, but I want a way to keep certain kinds of transactions different separated from others…

Are there any plans to work on this?