Category Groups

Category groups are the shelves your budget sits on. Categories hold money; groups keep related categories together so the budget table reads like a plan instead of a flat list. Getting the structure roughly right early saves you a lot of dragging later — though everything here can be renamed, reordered, and reorganized at any time.

What you get out of the box

When you create a budget and keep the starter categories option enabled, Budgero creates four groups with sensible categories inside:

Group	Starter categories	Meant for
Frequent	Groceries, Eating Out, Transportation	Spending that happens weekly or more
Non-Monthly	Auto Maintenance, Gifts, Home Improvement	Irregular "true expenses" you fund a little each month
Goals	Retirement, Vacation	Longer-term savings targets
Quality of Life	Health & Wellness, Entertainment	Discretionary spending you still want to plan

If you opt out of starter categories — common when you're importing an existing budget from YNAB or a CSV — none of these are created and you build your own structure.

System groups

Every budget also gets three system groups, regardless of the starter option:

• Income — inflows land here and feed Ready to Assign.
• Uncategorized — a holding pen for transactions that arrive without a category, typically from imports. Treat a non-empty Uncategorized as a to-do list.
• Transfers — used to keep money moving between accounts from being counted as income or spending.

You'll mostly interact with these indirectly. Their job is to keep the math honest: income counts once, transfers count never.

A structure that holds up

There's no single correct layout, but this blueprint works for most households:

1. Bills first. A group for fixed monthly obligations — rent or mortgage payment, utilities, subscriptions, insurance. These get funded before anything else, so put them at the top.
2. True expenses second. Irregular-but-inevitable costs: car repairs, annual fees, gifts, vet visits. Funding these monthly in small amounts is the single biggest stress-reducer zero-based budgeting offers.
3. Day-to-day third. Groceries, transport, eating out — the flexible spending you check most often during the month.
4. Savings and goals last. Emergency fund, vacation, down payment. Attach goals to these categories so Budgero tells you what to assign each month.

Keep it shallow. Six to eight groups with three to six categories each is a budget you'll actually read. Twenty groups is a filing cabinet.

Managing groups

• Create and rename groups anytime from the budget screen — names are yours to change without affecting any history.
• Reorder groups (and the categories inside them) by dragging. Order is purely cosmetic; reports and calculations don't care.
• Delete works only on empty groups. If a group still contains categories, Budgero will stop you — move the categories to another group or delete them first. This is deliberate: it prevents accidentally orphaning categories that hold assignment history.

Groups and your reports

Spending reports aggregate by category but group by, well, groups — so a tidy structure pays off twice. If "Eating Out" and "Coffee" live in the same group, you can see the combined line at a glance. When deciding whether two things should be separate categories or one, ask: would I ever want to see these numbers apart? If not, merge them and keep the budget table short.

When to restructure

Restructuring is cheap: moving a category to a different group keeps all its transactions, assignments, and history intact. The one operation that destroys data is deleting a category itself — covered in detail in the Categories guide. So experiment freely with groups; they're labels, not ledgers.