Sub-categories in pro

Feedback & Ideas Emma Pro
61

Tags would be for things that span across multiple categories / sub-categories, for example:

  1. Transactions related to that specific holiday (“Brazil January 2023”).
  2. Transactions related to dating (“Dating”).
  3. If you lost your luggage, tag transactions related to replacing those items (“Lost Luggage 2023”).
  4. Transactions that I need to include in my tax filing (“Tax 2023”).

In scenarios 1, 2, and 3, the tags help answer “why” there was a particular transaction. In scenario 4, the tags serve as a way to easily find the transaction again in future.

In all scenarios, the category provides the information about “what” the transaction was for. If you used custom categories instead of tags for the scenarios listed above, you would lose this.

The combination of category, sub-category, and tagging enables users to answer a really broad range of questions about their spending behaviour, and hopefully identify areas where they can make improvements.

For example, if you wanted to better understand your eating out and dating habbits:

  1. What type of eating out is costing me the most? (“Eating out” category, broken down by sub-category)
  2. If I exclude money spent on dates, what type of eating our is costing me the most? (“Eating out” category, broken down by sub-category, filtered to transactions tagged “dating”)
  3. How much am I spending on dating? (transactions tagged “dating”)
  4. Which dating activities are costing me the most? (transactions tagged “dating” broken down by category/sub-category)

In the scenario where the user has lost their luggage, it’s useful to have all those transactions tagged so it’s easy to find them again if you need to make an insurance claim; you could even have a separate tag for “Insurance claimed” and “Insurance paid”. If they did this as categories, it would clog up their category list, and makes it harder to find in future (“Was the transaction for those jeans under shopping or insurance - I can’t remember” vs “I’ll just look through my Shopping → Clothing sub-category”).

Additionally, the user might want to exclude all transactions related to their lost luggage from their Shopping budget (because it’s not a typical situation and they don’t want to skew their trends). If there was a way to search for all transactions tagged “Lost Luggage 2023” and then bulk edit the transactions from the search result, this would be really easy.

3 Likes
62

Couldnt have put it better

63

@edoardomoreni Is this likely to be implemented next year?

64

I think this is a top feature.

We have not prioritised it yet for a variety of reasons. The first one is we had other stuff to do unfortunately, the second is tags which work in the same way (more or less).

65

Yes I completely understand. Hopefully it is implemented as I think a lot of people would benefit from it!

Thanks and have a good Christmas

66

Tags are okay but cant set budgets to tags nice to have that drop down of sub categories for each category but its not a huge issue currently personally

1 Like
67

Would like more glyphs as apposed to emojis but that’s me being greedy. :sweat_smile::joy:

68

I’ve speed read through this thread and love the idea of subcategories. I think something that would be helpful would be to migrate the existing custom categories as a sub of another to make it easier to migrate from our existing categorisations

3 Likes
69

We’ll keep you updated on our progress with subcategories. Appreciate your interest!

70

@edoardomoreni any movement on sub categories?

71

Sorry guys - we have been working on a few different initiatives, but I think we can deliver sub-categories in 2025.

72

My own manual uses the categories already features within (but they are the sub-categories).

For example:

Main Category 1 - Essential

  • Rent
  • Bills
  • Groceries

Main Category 2 - Desirable

  • Shopping
  • Eating Out
  • Pub

Main Category 3 - Savings

  • Investments
73

I feel like this was a day one idea that’s never happened :joy:

To be fair, I haven’t seen a single good implementation of categories anywhere - lots of attempts to pay wall this kind of things too…

I’d just settle for a half-decent matching algorithm

2 Likes
74

The main issue is that there is this constant and continuous attempt to replicate the spreadsheet when it’s probably easier and better to use a spreadsheet in some cases. :sweat_smile:

With that said, spreadsheets are bad, but they provide a high level of customisation that no apps can provide on a case by case scenario.

75

I agree but sub categories shouldnt be a crazy one to have again for the pro user it can be super helpful. I’m desperately waiting for sub categories and renaming the default categories

76

How is the progress with sub-categories - is there any news on when it will be available?

2 Likes
77

Hey @mrchrisbrogan,

we are still discussing this internally; I think we are stuck on how useful this could be to be honest.

The app still allows the same granularity with custom categories; how would this be different if the UI just shows some categories under other categories?

78

For me I want to just budget high level so use top level caregories as:

Income
Bills/Subs
Everyday Spend
Luxuries/Ad Hoc
Exclude

Sub categories would mean you can then break down into useful analytics like the traditional categories

1 Like
79

For me i want to split travel to have flights, eating out etc but all under travel

2 Likes
81

Hi

I’m new to Emma, but I would definitely find it useful to be able to breakdown categories into sub categories from both a budgeting and analysis point of view. Being able to create a custom category and then (optionally) assign it to a higher category if appropriate, would give great flexibility in terms of analysing and budgeting at which ever level we would like to see.

Personally, I’m not sure you need to define the subcategories but people could create there own based on their individual needs