Categories
Categories describe what your transactions mean. They let you group spending and income into named buckets — Groceries, Salary, Utilities — so Tally Up can show you patterns and measure your budget performance.
How categories work
Section titled “How categories work”Categories are global — they are shared across all your plans, not tied to a specific plan. Any category you create is available everywhere in the app.
Categories are hierarchical. You can create parent categories with child categories underneath them. For example:
Living Costs ├── Groceries ├── Utilities └── TransportA category at any level can be applied to a transaction. Parent and child categories are independent — you can budget at whichever level makes sense for you.
Every category has a type: either Income or Expense. The type determines how Tally Up treats the category in budget reporting.
Managing categories
Section titled “Managing categories”Go to Settings → Categories to view, create, edit, and delete categories.
Creating a category
Section titled “Creating a category”Tap Add and fill in:
- Name — the display name (e.g.
Groceries) - Type — Income or Expense
- Parent — optional; choose a parent to nest this category under another
- Symbol — optional icon from the SF Symbols library (e.g. a shopping trolley for Groceries)
- Colour — optional accent colour shown alongside the icon
Editing a category
Section titled “Editing a category”Tap any category to edit its name, type, parent, symbol, or colour. Changes apply immediately across all transactions that use it.
Deleting a category
Section titled “Deleting a category”Swipe to delete.
Symbol and colour
Section titled “Symbol and colour”
Each category can have an icon (chosen from the SF Symbols library) and a colour. These are displayed as a coloured pill on every transaction row that uses the category, making it easy to spot spending patterns at a glance.
Child categories inherit the symbol and colour of their parent automatically. If you set a symbol or colour directly on a child, it overrides the inherited value for that child only — other children are not affected.
Tally Up’s built-in default categories come with symbols and colours pre-assigned. Any categories you create start without them until you set one.
Favourite categories
Section titled “Favourite categories”Mark a category as a favourite by toggling the favourite option in the category editor. Favourited categories appear pinned at the top of the category picker whenever you categorise a transaction, saving you from scrolling to find the ones you use most often.
Automatic categories
Section titled “Automatic categories”When you import transactions, Tally Up reads the category labels in the file and creates matching categories automatically. This saves manual setup if you are migrating from another finance app.
Tally Up’s auto-categorisation engine also assigns categories to new transactions based on your Category Rules. See Category Rules for details.
- Keep your top-level categories broad and use children for detail. Deep trees are harder to maintain.
- The type (Income vs Expense) matters for budgeting — make sure it matches how you use the category.
- Categories created during QIF import default to Expense if the type cannot be inferred from the file.