FAQ
Last updated
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Last updated
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Both categories and tags are used to organize your transactions, yet they serve different purposes. Categories dictate how the transactions will be treated throughout Lunch Money (expense vs. income, or excluded from totals), and are also an essential part of the budgeting aspect, as budgeting works on a category basis.
On the other hand, tags are used to further organize transactions for personal analytics. Tags are much more flexible to use than categories as they would be more specific and generally not associated with as many transactions as a category would. Moreover, unlike with categories, a transaction can be associated with multiple tags!
Some uses of tags may include tracking transactions associated with a specific event (eg. birthday party, wedding, etc.), a trip (eg. Brazil 2020, Italy 2021, etc.) or a particular project (eg. kitchen renovation, bedroom makeover).
To learn more about tags, and .
Category rules are used to automatically categorize transactions based on defined parameters. These rules can be set up via the Rules page, and will appear under the '' section of the Rules page:
For example, you can set up a rule that says: "If a transaction’s Payee name matches 'Pizza Hut' then set the category to 'Restaurants'".
There are various ways to get a filtered view of transactions associated with a certain category. On the Categories page, this is done by locating the magnifying glass icon on the far-right of the row for any of the categories.
If you notice the category selection changing immediately after adding a new transaction, the most common culprit would be a rogue rule that is overriding the category selection every time.
To learn more about Rules, .
By clicking on the magnifying glass icon (), a popup dialog will appear listing all transactions using that category. If needed, you can make changes to transactions directly in this view, or alternatively, click on the green “View transactions” button to open this filtered view on the Transactions page.
To resolve this, go to the and click on '' from the left-side menu to filter the page to display all rules affecting transaction categories. Look for the relevant rule, and you can then either click on it to update the rule criteria, or use the checkbox to the left to select and delete it.
If you are unable to identify the rule that is causing this, you can also check the log to identify the cause of the category change. If the category change was caused by a rule, it will display the text 'by rule' and you can click on 'rule' to quickly view and update the rule:
By default, Lunch Money will auto-create rules when updating categories. To disable this, you can head over to the and toggle-off the 'Auto-create rule when updating category' preference.
We are always looking for feedback on new features, and recommend opening a feature request ticket on the Feedback Board here:
