How to categorize expenses so you can actually use the numbers later

Short answer: pick a small set of categories that map to a decision you actually make later — not a spreadsheet-tidiness exercise — and let the app learn which merchant goes where so you stop assigning the same category by hand every time.

Most people's category list grows one of two bad ways: too few ("Shopping" for everything), which tells you nothing, or too many ("Wednesday Grocery Run"), which turns every scan into data entry. Neither survives past month two.

Start from the question you'll ask later

Before naming categories, decide what you'll actually want to know:

• Household: "How much did we spend on food this month?" needs Groceries and Dining split apart — lumping them together hides whether the problem is cooking or eating out.
• Freelancer or online seller: "What can I deduct?" needs categories that line up with how you'll export to your accountant — Office Supplies, Transportation, Internet & Phone, Professional Fees, Materials/Inventory.
• Anyone tracking a budget cap: only the categories with a real limit need to exist as their own line. Everything else can share "Other."
• Shop or cafe owner: "how much did each part of the menu bring in today" needs categories built around what you sell, not personal spending — see logging GCash and Maya payments for a small shop for that setup.

A dozen categories is usually plenty. If you're inventing a new one for every third receipt, you're tracking line items, not categories — that's a different feature.

Resiboo's default set, and why there's no emoji

Resiboo ships with fourteen categories — groceries, dining, coffee, transport, shopping, home, health, entertainment, travel, utilities, office, education, gifts, and other — each with an icon in a tinted circle rather than an emoji. Emoji render inconsistently across phones and fonts; an icon-in-a-circle stays legible and looks the same on every device.

Every one of them is editable. Rename "Home" to "Household," reorder the list by how often you use each one, add a category for a specific freelance client, or delete what you'll never use. New categories are created from a quick sheet, not a separate screen — there's no reason categorizing should feel like admin work.

Letting the app do the categorizing

Typing a category on every receipt is exactly the kind of manual step that makes people quit tracking expenses after two weeks. Resiboo avoids it two ways:

1. Merchant memory. The first time you correct a receipt's category — say, you tag a Shell receipt as Transport — Resiboo remembers that merchant. Every later receipt from Shell, or a close variant of that name, gets Transport automatically. You only ever correct a given merchant once.
2. Keyword fallback. For a merchant you've never seen before, Resiboo checks your own categories' keyword lists (words like "grocery" or "pharmacy" attached to a category) before giving up. If nothing matches, the category comes back blank — never a guess presented as fact — and you set it on Review & Confirm, which is also what teaches the merchant map for next time.

The result: your first week of scanning involves some correcting. By week three, most receipts from places you actually frequent — the same grocery, the same gas station, the same coffee shop — arrive pre-categorized.

Tags are the other axis

Categories answer "what kind of expense." Tags answer "which project, trip, or person." They're free text, many-to-many, and combine with category filters — so "Transport" receipts tagged "Baguio trip" is a real filter, not a category you'd have to invent and later delete. If you only need a grouping once — one reimbursement, one weekend — a tag is the right tool; a permanent category is for something you'll use every month.

A category list that survives a year

• Keep it under fifteen. More than that and you'll start guessing between two similar ones every time.
• Merge categories with almost nothing in them after a quarter — they're not earning their keep.
• Reserve tags for anything temporary; reserve categories for anything recurring.
• Review your merchant corrections occasionally. If Resiboo mis-learned a category (a merchant that sells both groceries and hardware, say), the fix is a single correction — it re-teaches the map from there.

Once your categories are stable, Stats turns them into an actual answer to "where did the money go" — spend by category, by merchant, and over time — with zero extra setup, because the categorizing already happened at capture.

Resiboo scans the receipt, resolves the merchant against what it's learned, and files it under the right category automatically — on-device, no account, correctable in one tap when it gets something wrong.