[gorgoiler]

Kudos, great execution on the project and on the code too.

Question: Is there a good equivalent of the Dewey Decimal system for household and/or business expenses? I like your two level breakdown in default_categories.yaml and the must/need/want system and I’m wondering what prior art you used to put that together?

I see about 800 payees for my own transactions over the past two years and while the big ticket items are easy enough to spot — my favourite grocery store, my landlord, etc. — having a taxonomy that can encompass the long tail of spending would give me confidence that I have 100% understanding of my finances.

Edit: Here’s one from some UN statisticians. Turn to page 40 of the PDF (p27 in print) for the basic structure overview:

https://unstats.un.org/unsd/classifications/Econ/Download/In...

The overview felt quite ergonomic but rebalancing the overview to maintain constant branching might be useful. Section 625 on “retail services” is very large.

[EnhancedJax]

Sorry, I don't seem to understand your question... I think you're talking about categories and subcategories? You can have household as the parent category and all the expenses under it. The must/need/want system (I think) is used by a lot of expense trackers, and for Bagels I used it as a way to limit unnecessary spending (want%).

I primarily built Bagels starting from my use case, so maybe some of the modelling might not suit expenses of large quantities. I haven't got to the point in life where I have to pay taxes and bills yet haha

[netsharc]

Seems like grandparent commenter wants to add classifying codes to items s/he's bought.

For example from that PDF, bagels would have the classification "23490 Bread and other bakers' wares". That's under "23 Grain mill products, starches and starch products; other food products" -> "234 Bakery products".

To be able to see how often one buys grain products, and then bread products, is either funny, or an unnecessary amount of detail.

I've thought of scanning all my grocery store receipts, for example to calculate how many liters of Coca-Cola I've bought in a time period...

[gorgoiler]

Yes, categories and sub-categories are important things to standardize if you have multiple people contributing to one cost reporting tool. My analogy was with the Dewey decimal system: a standard set of categories agreed upon by librarians so that they all agree how to organize their bookshelves!