Spending
The Spending page helps you answer "where did my money go?" without building a custom report first. It shows a donut chart grouped by top-level expense category, lets you filter the view, and lists the transactions behind the chart.
Use Spending when you want to:
- See this month's spending by category
- Drill into a category, such as Food & Dining, to see subcategories (parent-only spend shows as Food & Dining (general) so it is not confused with the subcategory total)
- Expand the Other slice to see the smaller categories rolled into it
- At a leaf category (including Uncategorized), see spending by merchant / payee instead of a single 100% category slice
- Filter by date range, account, tag, or payee
- Find uncategorized or miscategorized transactions and fix them
- Follow a recent trend from the Home dashboard into the exact transactions
Leaf categories: spending by payee
When you drill all the way into a category that has no subcategories — for example Restaurants, Groceries, or Uncategorized — the donut and legend switch from categories to payees. Related bank strings for the same merchant (store numbers, location suffixes, processor prefixes) share one slice when the app recognizes them as the same merchant.
Slice names prefer your aliases, then general merchant aliases, then a match in the merchant recognition database. If nothing matches, the chart shows a readable Proper Case form of the cleaned payee text.
Up to 10 payees appear by amount (largest first). Remaining spend rolls into Other. Payee slices are informational only — clicking one does not filter further. The transaction list still shows every transaction in that leaf category. The legend heading stays Spending by Category.
How Spending filters work
Spending has its own simple filter bar because most spending questions start with a period and a category. You can choose a date range, accounts, tags, and payee text, or click a chart slice to filter to that category.
Spending filters are designed for visual analysis. Transaction filters and views are designed for reusable transaction lists.
| If you want to... | Use |
|---|---|
| See spending totals and category shares | Spending |
| Drill from a chart into the transactions behind it | Spending |
| Save a reusable register view, such as "Large Amazon charges" | Transactions filters / Views |
| Pin a filtered transaction list to navigation | Views (pinned) |
Both surfaces use the same transaction data and the same basic rules, so a Spending chart and a matching transaction filter should agree on dates, accounts, tags, categories, and payees.
What counts as spending
Spending includes expense transactions and excludes transfers between your own accounts. Credit card payments are treated as transfers, not extra spending. Balance adjustment rows (register catch-up when aligning to the bank) are not everyday spending and do not appear in Spending totals. Refunds reduce spending in the category where they are assigned. Uncategorized expenses appear under Uncategorized so you can find and fix them.
The same exclusion rules apply to Income vs expense on Reports — see View income vs expense.
Home dashboard
The Home dashboard can show a Spending trend widget for the last 8 weeks. It uses a stacked area chart by top-level category. Click a week or category in the widget to open Spending with matching filters.