The type you pick at setup decides how your budget lines are arranged and how much detail you plan in. All three track the same spending; they differ in how finely you slice it.
Basic Categories
One line per top-level category: Housing, Groceries, Transportation, Entertainment. Spending in a subcategory still counts, a Rent transaction shows against Housing.
Best if you want a plan you'll actually keep up with, or you're budgeting for the first time.
Detailed Categories
Subcategories get their own lines, and the parent becomes a subtotal above them: Housing shows the total of Rent, Insurance and Maintenance, and you set the amounts on the children.
Best if a broad category hides decisions you care about: knowing you spent $900 on Food & Drink is less useful than knowing $620 was groceries and $280 was takeaway.
Two things to know:
- Subtotal rows aren't editable, and they're never double-counted in your totals, only the lines you set amounts on are added up.
- Because the amounts live on the subcategories, spending booked directly to the parent isn't counted in that group. If you find yourself categorising to the parent, either move those transactions to a subcategory, or switch that parent's subcategories off at setup so the parent becomes a line of its own.
Needs / Wants / Savings
The 50/30/20 approach. Your top-level categories sit in three buckets, and each bucket subtotals its members:
- Needs: the essentials: housing, utilities, groceries, transport, insurance, healthcare.
- Wants: the lifestyle: dining out, entertainment, travel, shopping.
- Savings, money you're putting aside or using to pay down debt.
The classic split is 50% needs, 30% wants, 20% savings, but the buckets are useful even if you don't hit those numbers. They show at a glance whether a tight month is really about essentials or about choices.
Moving a category between buckets
Financio's first guess comes from the category name, so it won't always agree with you: plenty of households treat Pets as a need and Education as a want, or the other way round. Move them at setup:
Drag a category by the handle on the left of its row and drop it into another bucket. The row's checkbox still toggles it on and off, only the handle starts a drag.
Tap the ••• on a category and choose Move to Needs, Move to Wants or Move to Savings.
Buckets are set during setup. To rearrange them afterwards you'll need to start the budget again. See Adjusting Amounts.
Changing type later
The type is fixed once the budget exists, because the lines and buckets are built around it. To switch, delete the budget and set a new one up: your transactions and categories are untouched, but your budgeted amounts are lost, so note the ones you want to keep first.