Select your
budget categories.

The first time you sign in (or any time you click Relaunch setup wizard on the Categories page), Talli walks you through a default list of parent groups and their common subcategories. Tick the subcategories you want to budget for; leave the rest unticked.

Almost always worth picking:

• Food & Drink → Groceries; possibly Takeaway and Cafe if you spend regularly.
• Home → Rent or Mortgage, Internet, Electricity.
• Transport → Petrol, or Public transport, whichever you use.
• Entertainment → Streaming subscriptions.

Often skip:

• Vet, Mechanic — irregular enough that monthly targets don't help.
• Bank fees, Interest — you don't choose them; not worth a line item.
• Anything you only spend on once or twice a year.

Two things happen, depending on how the transaction gets categorised:

If a rule (or you, manually) tags it with a canonical category name like Vet or Bank fee, that category gets created under the matching parent — but as an off-budget child. Off-budget categories don't appear on the Categories page and don't get their own row in the Budget. Instead they sit under the parent's Other (N not in budget) rollup. Visible, summed, but not contributing to any target.

If you leave it uncategorised, it lands in the synthetic Uncategorized row at the top of your Budget — outside any parent group.

Open the Budget page and expand the Other rollup under any parent. Each row inside has an Add to budget link in the Budgeted column.

Clicking it promotes the category to on-budget: it appears on the Categories page and as a regular row in the Budget. You can then click Set budget to enter a monthly target.

Open the Categories page, find the subcategory you no longer want to actively track, and click Remove from budget.

The category itself isn't deleted — your existing transactions still tag to it. It just disappears from the curated Categories list and gets absorbed into the parent's Other rollup. Reversible at any time via Add to budget.

• Start lean. 10–15 subcategories total is plenty for most people. You can always add more.
• Pair frequency with line items. If you spend on something every month and want to predict it, give it a line. One-offs belong in Other.
• Income gets categories too. Salary, side income, and refunds work the same way — pick the income types you actually want to see broken out.
• Don't over-split. Two cafe purchases a week don't need separate Cafe and Coffee lines. One is fine.

Categories aren't tags. A single transaction belongs to exactly one category. If you need multi-dimensional grouping (e.g. Holiday — Food vs Holiday — Travel), use Splits — each split row picks its own category, so one transaction can cover several budget lines.