Categories
What turns a list of payments into an income and expense report: category types, groups, and the system categories you cannot edit.
A category is what a transaction was for. Rent, groceries, salary, dividends. Categorising is the one piece of routine work Walletguide asks of you, and it is what every income and expense number is built on.
Types
Each category has a type, and the type is what the reports actually sum.
| Type | For |
|---|---|
activeIncome | Money you worked for: salary, fees, invoices |
passiveIncome | Money your assets made: dividends, rent received, interest |
gainsLosses | Changes in what something is worth, realised or not |
fixedExpenses | Spend that recurs whether you act or not: rent, insurance |
variableExpenses | Spend you decide on each time: groceries, travel |
neutral | Movement that is neither income nor expense |
Splitting income into active and passive is the point rather than a detail: the ratio between them is the one number that says how much of your life is funded by your work versus your assets.
Groups
Categories roll up into groups, and groups are what the reports break down by when the category list gets long. A group is presentation, not accounting — the type on each category is still what decides the sums.
System categories
Three exist in every wallet and cannot be edited or deleted: transfer, balance and offset. The engine uses them to keep totals right — a transfer between your own accounts, a correcting entry when a balance is restated, an offset that cancels something that would otherwise double-count.
They exist so that the arithmetic works, and they are deliberately out of your hands.
Merging
Two categories that turned out to mean the same thing can be merged. Everything moves to the survivor and the other is deleted — not reversible, so the app asks first.
Defaults that do the work for you
Assign a merchant a default category and every future transaction from them is categorised on arrival. This is what takes categorising from an ongoing chore to a few minutes at the start.