Would it be possible to have an extra layer to the categories and link multiple categories to those groups and the view the analytics by those higher level categories?
The idea would be so you could group several bills categories, like utility, housing (like mortgage, service charges, ground rent) into 1 group, another group could be groceries, clothing, etc… in another. This way you could look at the analytics by those groups first and then drill down to the sub categories for more of a breakdown. So rather then seeing 20+ categories with different amounts and mentally working out which categories you need to analysis for saving excess, you see the analytics in 4 or 5 groups, first to give a big simple picture. May need option to default which view you see first.
Could be useful if want to split by committed spend groups to must spend and other spending.
Just a nice to have feature I think, but could be very useful
Sort of yeah, but think some of your default ones are what I may consider as the subcategory, but would like to change name of some of those, for now, just would have to create custom ones and leave those default ones hanging around and empty. Just would have to think more how to group better
I have been using sub-categories for years. But I have never set up budgets on them. I set up Transportation budget. I do an oil change once or twice a year – I adjust say October budget for Transportation by a couple hundred bucks. The same for car insurance if I pay it annually. If I pay car insurance monthly. It is one transaction. The same amount every month. I don’t want to set up a budget for one transaction. Budgets are buckets. We do not put 1 item in a bucket. We use buckets for multiple items. Right? The same with bills. I have all kinds of transactions categorized as bills. I have utilities sub-group. But managing a budget for each sub-group is too much of a hassle I find. I know my Bills budget goes up by 300-400 dollars in the winter because of heating (utilities). Budgeting bigger buckets allows me to be consistent. My life changes. But I can still compare my budgets. Even year over year. Going back 10+ years.
I would look at my expenses (filter) by sub-categories sometimes. That’s my only reason for having them.
Now the big question: how do I manage sub-categories with Emma? I think I will try to use tags. I would love to see tags in the transaction list without the need to drill inside the transaction. If the tags are not visible right away – they are not too useful.
It would be nice to have quick tag filters at the top when I come in from Analytics and drill inside the budget. There will only be a few tags inside a certain budget. Not sure if tags are auto-attached the same way as budget categories on new transactions.
Hi
I think creating more categories is the opposite of what is being requested, think the idea is to have less categories to use for budgets or view analytics and then sub divide transactions inside that category.
If had looking at the bills category, there are different types of bills, utility, entertainment, housing etc… which would be good to have that option. Think some people would like to budget on sub category and others on the main category. Looking at bill category, you could budget a total of 1000 a month on bills and then breakdown the transactions in to sub categories, so have 800 for housing including things like mortgage, service charges, ground rent, then 100 for utilities (electricity, water, gas) and then 100 on entertainment (Internet, phone line, TV packages, etc…). Could want to budget just the bills as a single figure of 1000 and then drill down to sub category to see that spend or budget by subcategory but view as main category as a total
Think I would like the choice, and mix the 2, categories for miscellaneous spend, I wouldn’t necessarily want to budget say 50 on clothes, 100 on eating out, 20 on coffees, etc… would prefer to set budget for miscellaneous spend as 170 and then free to alternate each month where the money goes but monitor the 170 as a total. And then have bills budgeted by sub category cause they are more consistent each month, but still view as total bills.
Usually if I take time to assign a sub-category… It probably means that the Merchant is not descriptive enough for me… Maybe… if you think adding a second line of text per transaction looks too busy on the screen… Maybe you can cut off Merchant text sooner (adding …) If the sub-category kind of replaces it… Displaying the first transaction tag on the same text line as the Merchant…
Yeah, I think adding tags to the transaction list might be a better idea than adding subcategories, especially if you’re not worried about setting budgets for subcategories.
I’ll share your feedback with the team and see what we can do
I would be a huge fan of being able to have nested sub-categories in addition to custom categories for transaction assigning, budgeting, analytics. I needed these so tried using additional custom categories (even with common prefixes to attempt grouping the categories) but it became unmanageable very quickly and didn’t achieve what I needed.
Can I please ask that as this feature is being developed that you guys consider how the transformation of historic data into new sub-categories will work? would it be possible to go into a custom category and change it to a sub-category and assign/nest it as needed and have assigned transactions “follow”?
Either way, a big yes from me for sub-categories!!
Love to hear that you’re excited about this feature
Yeah this is definitely something we’ll take into consideration Hopefully it can be as simple as a button that says “change to sub cat” but we’ll know more when we start to build it.
What kind of things do you think you’d change from custom categories into sub categories?
When playing with categories, we are always a bit concerned about confusing the user → as in moving all the transactions from one category to the other.
Basically anything that is one of the standard categories (or a similar custom category) could be split out… so Income could then be split into salary, dividends, interest, contributions, gifts etc. Bills could be split into Utilities, Rent/Mortgage, Credit/Loan Repayments, Insurances etc. I also tried to (unsuccessfully) build groupings of custom categories (by using prefixes) for Spending (treats, days out…), Food&Drink (coffee, lunches…), Costs (as in pet care, school trips…), Groceries (weekly, ad hoc…).
Hope this helps!
Regards user confusion, I would say… don’t underestimate your users!! especially your Emma Pro users for those of use who invest in Emma Pro to benefit from added features, we probably tend to be users who are more technically minded anyway.
I think as long as help text makes it clear what a user is about to do, then it’s up to us to be careful when selecting “save changes”!
What would be really nice is to have some analaytic reporting on Categories them selves before we add sub categories. We can still not get a basic 12 month total summary by category. We should be trying to get the basics in place first before adding additional complexity
Hi @rebekah
I think yes, I would want to have budgets at sub-category level. It would be cool if you could set the budgets from top down or bottom up! I.e. set a total at category and then be able to split it across sub-cat’s (similar to split transactions function) or so we could set budget at sub-cat level and have it total up to give overall category budget. Maybe I’m being a little ambitious here though?!
Having said all this, it would be important to have the choice not to have to set budgets at sub-cat level if not desired. I can imagine for some categories I would budget to a granular level but some I wouldn’t.
I understand where @Wmeads001 is coming from. Would be great to get enhanced category analytics as well as ability to be more granular with categorising, reporting and budgeting.
Thanks for all the hard work Emma team!
Hopefully it can be as simple as a button that says “change to sub cat” but we’ll know more when we start to build it.
for those of use who invest in Emma Pro to benefit from added features, we probably tend to be users who are more technically minded anyway.