How Categories Work
Tutorial Guide: How Categories Work in Fina
This video is all about how categories work inside of Fina.
This guide walks you through Fina's powerful categorization feature, helping you better manage your transactions, create detailed financial reports, and tailor your personal finance experience. Below is a detailed breakdown of each core section from the video tutorial, offering insights to maximize your financial organization with Fina.
1. Introduction to Categories (00:00)
This section introduces how Fina uses categories to classify transactions, allowing you to organize your finances for clearer and more accurate reporting.
Key Highlight: Categories are fundamental to structuring your financial data, ensuring every transaction is assigned correctly for reporting.
2. What Are Categories? (01:40)
Categories in Fina allow you to bucket transactions into areas like income, expenses, and transfers. This ensures that when reviewing reports, the data is both relevant and insightful.
Key Highlight: Understanding categories helps ensure your financial reports reflect your actual spending, income, and transfers accurately.
3. Income, Expenses, Transfers (02:35)
This section breaks down Fina’s three primary transaction areas:
Income: Positive transactions such as wages or refunds.
Expenses: Negative transactions such as bills or groceries.
Transfers: Transactions between accounts that are excluded from reports to avoid double-counting.
Key Highlight: Properly categorizing transfers avoids inflating your expenses or income, ensuring accurate financial summaries.
4. How Transfers Work (03:05)
Transfers are explained in greater detail here, focusing on how Fina marks them to prevent them from being double-counted, especially when moving money between linked accounts.
Key Highlight: Fina's transfer categorization ensures that your reports remain accurate and streamlined.
5. Groups vs. Categories (03:50)
Groups allow you to combine several related categories into one, such as "Food and Drink" containing both groceries and dining out. This provides high-level overviews while maintaining specific tracking for individual expenses.
Key Highlight: Grouping categories helps you get a broader perspective on your spending habits without losing the details.
6. Quickly Cross-Referencing Transactions (04:20)
You can easily cross-reference transactions in a specific category to review them quickly and ensure they’re correctly classified. This section shows how to click on a category and view all associated transactions.
Key Highlight: Fina allows fast, accurate cross-referencing of transactions, giving you confidence that your categorization is correct.
7. Custom Category List Creation (05:00)
In this section, you’ll learn how to create your own category schema, either from scratch or by adjusting Fina’s default category list. This allows you to personalize your financial tracking to fit your specific needs.
Key Highlight: Customize your categories to match your unique financial situation, providing a system that works best for you.
8. AI Classifications (06:57)
Fina uses AI to automatically classify transactions, saving you time and effort. While AI takes care of the bulk of categorization, manual adjustments can still be made for fine-tuning.
Key Highlight: AI-driven automation streamlines the categorization process, but you retain full control to make adjustments.
9. Snapshots (12:37)
The snapshot feature allows you to save the current state of your category setup. If you make changes you later regret, you can revert to a saved snapshot without losing any important data.
Key Highlight: Snapshots let you experiment with new category setups while having the security of reverting back to previous configurations if needed.
10. Sharing a Category List with Others (13:45)
Fina lets you share your category setup with others or between profiles, making it easy to duplicate or collaborate on financial management. This feature allows users to share their personalized financial structures with team members or across multiple accounts.
Key Highlight: Sharing category lists enables collaboration, allowing others to benefit from your custom financial organization or vice versa.
Summary of Key Features:
Categories: Essential for transaction organization and accurate financial reporting.
Income, Expenses, Transfers: Separate key transaction types for better clarity.
Groups: Combine related categories for broad insights.
AI Classifications: Automate transaction categorization and save time.
Snapshots: Save and revert to category setups to experiment without risk.
Sharing: Share your category structures with others for easy collaboration.
For more details and to start organizing your finances with ease, visit fina.money and sign up today!