Categorization

Every transaction lands in a spending category — Groceries, Transportation, Restaurants, Housing, Entertainment, Salary — so your dashboard shows where your money actually went, without you tagging anything by hand.

Your choices come first

The most important thing to know about categorization is the order of precedence: your decisions outrank Bica’s.

If you’ve set a rule, the rule wins. If you’ve corrected a merchant’s category before, that correction wins. Only where you’ve expressed no preference does Bica decide for itself.

This means Bica converges on your habits rather than fighting them. Recategorize one Uber ride as Business travel and it stops asking. Set a rule that everything from your landlord is Housing and it stays that way regardless of what the description says.

Correcting a category

Change the category on any transaction and the change applies going forward for that merchant. You don’t have to fix the same place twice.

If you want a correction applied to your history too, or you want something more specific than “this merchant is always this category”, that’s what rules are for.

Rules

Rules are the manual override, and they matter more than they sound. A rule matches on the merchant or on text in the description, and assigns a category.

The cases where they earn their keep:

One merchant, two meanings. You buy groceries and household goods at the same supermarket. A rule on the description text can split them.
Merchants a machine can’t interpret. A transfer to your landlord looks like a transfer to a person. Only you know it’s rent.
Your own vocabulary. If you think in terms of Fixed, Guilt-free and Savings rather than the standard categories, rules let you get there without recategorizing every transaction.

Designing categories that stay useful

Default categories exist, and you can create your own. The temptation is to create a lot of them. Resist it — this is the most common way people abandon a budgeting tool.

A category is worth having if you’d act differently based on what it shows. Groceries is worth having: seeing €640 instead of €400 changes what you do next week. Bakeries separate from Supermarkets is usually not — you’re never going to make a decision that treats them differently, so all it does is make your breakdown harder to read.

A workable rule of thumb: eight to twelve categories that each show a number you’d react to. If a category is under about 3% of your spending and isn’t something you’re actively trying to cut, fold it into a broader one.

The split that reliably earns its place is fixed versus variable — the costs you can’t change this month against the ones you can. There’s a guide on why that split matters and how to set it up.

What Bica won’t do

Bica won’t silently change a category you’ve set. It won’t reclassify your history overnight because it changed its mind. And where it isn’t confident, it leaves a transaction uncategorized rather than filing it somewhere plausible-looking — an uncategorized transaction is visible and fixable, while a wrong one quietly corrupts every total it touches.

Merchant recognition — the step that makes categorization possible
Autopilot — whether categorization runs without you
Setting up categories that match your life — the longer, practical version of this page