Categories

Every bill and transaction can be labeled with a category — Housing, Groceries, Subscriptions, and so on — so you can see where your money actually goes, not just what’s coming up next.

The category list

Tally uses one fixed list of categories, the same for every account: Housing, Utilities, Insurance, Transportation, Subscriptions & Streaming, Technology, Groceries, Dining & Restaurants, Health & Medical, Childcare & Kids, Education, Savings & Investments, Debt Payments, Entertainment, Clothing & Apparel, Travel, Pets, Personal Care, Donations & Giving, Family Support, and Other. You can’t add your own — anything that doesn’t fit elsewhere goes in Other.

Setting a category

You can set a bill’s or transaction’s category yourself from a dropdown when you add or edit it. As you type a name, Tally may show a suggested category — see Categorize your spending for how suggestions work and what the confidence badge means.

A category you set yourself, or a suggestion you accept, counts as confirmed. A bill or transaction with no category set yet still shows up in the Categories report — Tally makes its own best guess from the name for the purposes of the report, but that guess is never saved, and doesn’t count as confirmed until you actually pick it.

Applying a purchase to a reserve that has a category gives the purchase that category as its starting guess — only if you haven’t confirmed one yourself, and it’s taken back off if you remove the purchase from the reserve.

One transaction that covers several kinds of spending — groceries and a gift on the same receipt — can be split across categories. Each part counts under its own category in the report.

The Categories report

The Categories page (in the main navigation) shows how much you spent in each category — one Spent amount per category, with a chart of the biggest ones. Tap a category to see every bill and transaction in it, each labelled with where it came from: “Bill · paid Oct 3”, “Synced” (from your bank), “Manual” (entered by hand), or “Planned” (still to come).

Picking a date range

The control at the top shows the range you’re looking at, like October 2026 (so far). Use the ‹ › arrows to step back and forward — a month at a time, or by whatever the range is (three months, a year, a pay cycle). Tap the range itself to pick a preset:

• This month (the default) and Last month
• Last 3 months, Year to date, Last 12 months, and Last year
• Current pay cycle and Last pay cycle, if the account has a forecast set up
• Custom — any start and end date, up to a year apart

A range that covers more than one month also shows your average spending per month. The range is part of the page’s address, so reloading, the back button, and a bookmarked or shared link all keep it.

Filters

Filters picks which money counts — Actual or Include planned — and can limit the report to categories you’ve confirmed:

Actual (the default)

What you’ve actually spent in the range — for a range that includes today, up to today:

• Transactions dated today or earlier that reduce your balance (debits) — a paycheck doesn’t count against a spending total, and anything dated later than today hasn’t happened yet. On a bank-connected account, a payment you entered by hand that the bank hasn’t posted yet waits until it does, so it’s never counted twice.
• Bills paid — each bill (or recurring transaction) you’ve marked paid in the range counts once. If a bank transaction is linked to that payment, the transaction is what counts, at its real amount and date; otherwise the amount you marked it paid at. A bill that’s due but not paid yet — even one that’s overdue — doesn’t count. A bank transaction that pays a bill shows under the bill’s category (your mortgage payment shows under Housing) unless you’ve picked a different category for the transaction itself.

One limitation: on an account you track by hand, a paid bill counts on its due date, since Tally doesn’t record the day you paid it. A September bill you paid in October counts in September.

Include planned

Everything committed in the range, paid or not:

• Bills count at their real due amount, for however many times they’re actually due in the range — a weekly bill due 4 times this month counts 4 times, an annual bill due in a different month counts 0 times in this one. Bills aren’t smoothed to a monthly rate.
• Transactions count for the whole range, including ones dated later than today, and only ones that reduce your balance (debits) — plus refunds, below.

Each category shows how much of its total is still planned — a lighter part of its bar, and a “$X planned” figure under the amount.

Refunds

In both views, a refund lowers the spending in its category — a $117.93 return to a store you’d spent $300 at shows $182.07 spent. A refund counts once you’ve picked its category (money coming in that you haven’t categorized could just as well be a paycheck or a transfer), or as soon as you link it back to a reserve. Money linked to one of your income sources, and money in the Other category, never counts. If a category’s refunds add up to more than you spent in it, it shows as “−$X refunded” and stays out of the chart.

Tally remembers which view you picked on this browser. In both views, a reserve itself never counts as spending — it’s a target, not money that moved — but each purchase made from a reserve counts under its own category.

Free accounts see the full chart and table for the account they’re viewing, for this month or last month, and can use the Actual / Include planned toggle too. Tally Plus adds every other date range, sorting, the confirmed-only filter, and tapping a category to see every bill or transaction inside it — where you can tap an item to confirm or change its category on the spot.

Privacy

Setting a category on your own bills and transactions never leaves your account by default. Tally’s optional category suggestions are powered by a shared reference of anonymized merchant names other users have opted to contribute — see Categorize your spending for what that means and how to turn it on or off.