Every chart, budget and insight in Talvo is built on one foundation: categories. Get them right and everything downstream gets sharper. Talvo ships with a sensible default set — Groceries, Rent & mortgage, Subscriptions and so on — but the whole system is yours to reshape: rename anything, pick colors and icons, add your own categories, and organise them into groups. This guide shows where category management lives and how to make the set truly yours.
Two doors to the same room
You can manage categories from two places, and they do exactly the same thing:
- From the Spending page — open Manage categories and a panel slides in next to your data. This is the natural place when you're looking at a breakdown and realise a category is missing or misnamed.
- From Settings → Categories — the same manager as a full page, comfortable for a bigger reorganisation session.
Either way, changes save automatically — there's no Save button to forget — and apply everywhere at once: past transactions, budgets, charts and Insights.
Expenses, income and transfers
Categories come in three types, and the manager shows one tab for each:
- Expenses — where money goes: Groceries, Entertainment, Utilities…
- Income — where money comes from: Salary, Freelance, Gifts, Refunds…
- Transfers — money moving between your own accounts. Keeping transfers as their own type is what stops a €500 move to savings from showing up as €500 of “spending”.
Creating a category
Hit Add category and you get four choices to make:
Name, color, icon, group. The color and icon follow the category into every chart, list and budget bar in the app.
Already in your language. Talvo's default categories are translated automatically — a Dutch speaker sees Boodschappen, Huur & hypotheek and Nutsvoorzieningen out of the box, no renaming needed. Custom names are for making categories yours: “Padel & tennis”, “The dog”, “Renovation 2026”.
Category groups: the bigger picture
Once you have more than a dozen categories, patterns hide in the noise. Category groups fix that: create a group with the + Group button — give it a name and a color — then assign categories to it. “Rent & mortgage”, “Utilities” and “Household” might roll up into a Home group; “Drinks & dining”, “Entertainment” and “Travel” into Fun.
Groups give you a two-level view of your money: the detail when you want it (which supermarket, which subscription), and the big buckets when you don't (how much does Home cost me per month, all-in?).
Renaming, recoloring, reorganising
Everything is editable after the fact. Click any category to rename it, change its color or icon, or move it to another group. Changes apply retroactively — recolor “Groceries” and twelve months of charts update instantly. No transaction is ever orphaned by a rename; the history simply follows the category.
A few habits that pay off
- 1Fewer categories than you think. Twelve to eighteen expense categories is plenty. If two categories always move together, merge them mentally into one.
- 2Split only what you'll act on. Separate “Drinks & dining” from “Groceries” because you'd budget them differently. Don't separate “Coffee” from “Tea”.
- 3Use groups for reporting, categories for budgeting. Budget at the category level, review at the group level.
- 4Let rules do the sorting. Talvo auto-categorises transactions and learns your corrections — a well-shaped category set means the automation lands almost everything in the right place.
With categories in shape, your budgets get easier to set and your Insights page gets dramatically more readable — the Sankey diagram is only as clear as the categories feeding it.