Categorize Your Spending

Setting a category

When you add or edit a bill or transaction, a Category dropdown lets you pick from Tally’s fixed category list. Leave it on “Uncategorized” if you’d rather not label it — it’ll still show up in the Categories report, just under a best guess instead of a confirmed category.

Using suggestions

As you type a bill’s name (or a transaction’s description), Tally may show a suggestion below the field:

Suggested: Insurance (best guess)   Use   Dismiss

• Use fills in the suggested category. You can still change it afterward — picking a different one from the dropdown always wins.
• Dismiss hides the suggestion for that entry without picking anything.

The text in parentheses is a confidence badge:

• High confidence — this exact name has been confirmed before, by you or another user who’s opted in to sharing suggestions.
• Best guess — a close match to a previously-confirmed name, or a fallback based on common keywords (like “insurance” or “electric”) if nothing similar has been confirmed yet.

Either way, accepting a suggestion (or picking a category yourself) marks it as confirmed.

Reading the Categories report

Open Categories from the main navigation to see a chart and table of your spending, broken down by category. See Categories for exactly what’s included and how bills and transactions are compared on the same footing.

On a paid account, click any row in the table to expand it and see every bill or transaction inside that category — each with its own dropdown, so you can confirm or correct its category right from the report.

Privacy

Categorizing your own bills and transactions never leaves your account. Suggestions get better over time from a shared, anonymized reference — other users’ confirmed merchant names (never amounts, dates, or account details), matched against what you type.

Contributing to that shared reference is off by default. To turn it on for an account, go to that account’s Settings page and check Help improve category suggestions. Once on, confirming a category adds an anonymized version of the name to the shared reference — lowercased, punctuation stripped, and checked against a filter that skips anything that looks like it might contain a name, address, or account number. See the Privacy Policy for the full details.