New Categories?

[sciondriver]

How can I add new categories that aren't on the list? (computer, newspaper subscriptions, magazine subscriptions)

[mike_feinstein]

I definitely want to change around the categories and add my own.

[Damon]

The only option right now would be to tag the transactions. If you have additional categories that you would like to be supported, please put them here or send an email to feedback@mint.com (I will make sure it gets in my report about customer wants).

[sciondriver]

Category ideas: Computer (hardware and software), Subscriptions (newspaper, magazine, website subscriptions)

[MrsThorsen]

OK I'm a CPA so this may be too much for "normal" people, but here are my suggestions:

"Shopping" is awfully broad. And arbitrary. I don't understand why DVDs are listed under "entertainment" but books are listed under "shopping".

Rename "Business Services" to "Professional Services" and include Advertising, Legal, Architecture & Landscape Design, Accounting, Consulting.

Actual "Business Expenses" are probably best sorted via a tag (if I understand how your system works exactly, I'm not certain) so that *any* of the categories can be tagged business expense for those people with businesses, and an entirely new category full of duplicate subcategories need not exist specifically for business expenses.

I'd limit "Home" to Home Improvements, Home Maintenance (this will include both home services and materials related to maintenance), Home Insurance, Property Taxes, Mortgage/Rent.

I'd split "Shopping" into at a minimum 2 categories: Durable, and Non-Durable. I can't think of the non-technical terms but I'm sure others can come up with good names. Basically, track all your insurable purchases (furniture, jewelry, computers & electronics, appliances, etc.) in durable since those items are really assets and shouldn't necessarily be included in reports of monthly spending. Non-durable will be everything else, books, dvds, clothes, sporting goods, crafts/hobbies, household supplies, etc.; these are items that wear out, are regularly replaced, or consumed.

I'd probably have a category for "Food" with subs for groceries, restaurant dining, fast food dining, beverages, since groceries vs. dining out is a common thing for people to track, and beverages is a little nitpicky but if you add up all the happy hour &/or coffee break costs it's a common thing for people to cut back on when they're saving for something.

This might be too complicated, but it would be convenient if all ATM line items were automatically split so that any odd amount was charged to bank fees and the rest was a transfer to cash. I don't know of any ATMs anywhere that give out $1 bills or change, so an ATM charge of $51.50 would go $1.50 fee/$50 cash, $102.00 would be $2 fee/$100 cash. It's a simple formula. Also with cash, it would be nice if people had the option to enter their cash transactions manually. It could be a set-up question, "would you like to enter cash transactions manually, or post all atm withdrawals to expense category "cash"?

Sorry for such a laundry list of requests, but I really haven't yet found the ideal financial aggregator and that's what beta is for, right? :o

[mlebarron]

"Shopping" is awfully broad. And arbitrary. I don't understand why DVDs are listed under "entertainment" but books are listed under "shopping".

Who really uses books for entertainment anymore? ;)

I agree that "Shopping" is way too broad. Most of them could go under other sections.

I'm actually not too keen on breaking them down into the master and sub categories like that. I find just one level of categories better, especially when trying to use both categories and tags.

I would probably use "Personal" (or whatever... I can't think of anything at the moment) as a category for something like a Barnes and Noble purchase, then tag it with books, or dvd, or whatever I actually got.

[Damon]

"Sorry for such a laundry list of requests, but I really haven't yet found the ideal financial aggregator and that's what beta is for, right?"

Correct;-)

Thanks for the category suggestions. You are correct in assuming that is how tags "should" work on the site.

[ankeetshah]

Some category suggestions:

- Change "Auto" category to "Auto & Transportation" to include sub-category of "Public Transportation" (monthly pass for New York's subway system)
- "Nightlife" or "Bars" -- I'm trying to track how much I spend when I go out and therefore trying to decide how to categorize bar tabs, cover charges for clubs/lounges, and taxi fares
- "Delivery & Take-out" sub-category under "Food" category -- I like to track how much money I spend on ordering in
- "Communication" or something similar to include purchases for Skype minutes (calling card), etc

[Tau]

The categories that I'd like to use are certainly different than those of a single guy living in the city. If mine (kid's clothes, diapers, toys, education) were included with his (bars, taxis, take-out), Mint users would be completely overwhelmed.

Unfortunately for Mint, Wesabe has you beat in category flexibility. :o

Is any flexibility in the works?

[shinyobject]

I agree that Mint should have lots of categories, but I should be able to customize my own category lists. If it can't do this, then I can't get an accurate picture of my spending the way I see it. This will hinder the "me vs. others" comparison, but that doesn't bother me.

I would prefer to get a clear picture of my finances than to know how I compare to others.

[mlebarron]

As mentioned in a couple other threads... "Labels" are available to further customize your categories.

I think it's a little up in the air how they will work together, but at the moment you can certainly do things like categorize as "Food" and label "TakeOut"

[waynep]

We need a job expenses (reimbursable and non-reimbursable) and then logically also an income category for job reimbursements.

[Damon]

I think this can be achieved by labels right now. I think we have two sets of customers using Mint.com right now, which would include business users (not our core product) & personal users (core product).

That being said, we are looking at increasing the categories and/or letting users create their own categorization rules.

[mwbarker]

How about just being about to add/delete your own categories without having to have them added by the admins? So many people can categorize things in so many different ways. I would prefer to be able to at least add my own.

[mlebarron]

I think we have two sets of customers using Mint.com right now, which would include business users (not our core product) & personal users (core product).

Personal users can quite often cross over into business users that would need a flag like "reimbursable" (but can be done with tags right now, I agree).

For example I would use it for personal expenses, but on rare occasions I have to travel with my job, and I have to use my own card, then get reimbursed. I would want to flag those as not included in any calculations. I still remain as using it for personal expenses, but have that small business user aspect on occasion.

I imagine also for now you could tag it, and categorize it to have mint ignore it. The danger in that is if it starts to ignore other items from that merchant as well.

[aporter]

The biggest category I see missing is something to cover bars/nightlife. I spend too much on alcohol and with the current categories, It's all just mixed in with restaurants.

[aporter]

Until there's a bars/nightlife type category, I just started using the "Entertainment" category. It's working well, especially since that's one included in the spending summary on the overview page.

[Damon]

Did you also try creating labels? Could be another way to quickly identify those expenses.

[mgetoff]

I'd like to see Summer Camps; Music Lessons; Sports/Dance fees.

I'd also like to see a category for 529 savings, either in Kids or in a Savings category, which would also include Short-Term Savings; Long-Term Savings; Retirement Savings; Holiday Shopping Savings, etc. etc.

[labsix]

Labels would work IF we could create rules for them.

[Damon]

Our MintProduct posting ID will be out here asking for feedback on categories today:)

[Vsekret]

I completely agree that we need to have more control over the categories. I am a professional musician...and my job expenses are all listed under "Entertainment" and "Shopping." So, its not much help to look at my pie chart and see my Shopping expenses up the wazoo because I was purchasing music books!

I think there should also be a "savings" budgeting option.

[whetherly]

I've just signed up for Mint today and am already, like others in this thread, looking for more flexibility in categorization.

I understand the need to have a fixed list of non-user-customizable categories so that consistent data is fed back into your auto-categorization system (which already works impressively well and should work even better once your user base grows).

Labels are a perhaps acceptable substitute for user-defined categories in the situation where the category list is not fine-grained enough. E.g., someone who wants to distinguish their bar tab from their restaurant bills. What is still needed here is the ability to set a rule to assign labels as well as categories to transactions.

I think a bigger problem is that users can't customize the category hierarchy. I, for one, don't keep track of my spending at a very fine-grained level. Rather, I keep track of spending within certain parent categories, the equivalent of "Shopping" or "Entertainment" in Mint. That we're stuck with Mint's inflexible category hierarchy is a bigger problem than the problem above, of not being able to create new nodes in the hierarchy. The reason is that the parent categories make natural budget targets (anything more specific is unwieldy). They are also used to build any kind of at-a-glance spending report, like the pie chart.

My first suggestion: users should be able to create custom parent categories, or folders, to which they can assign the fixed Mint categories. I don't think this would compromise the integrity of the categorization data collected from users (the meaning of the "Furnishings" category isn't altered if a user puts it under Shopping instead of Home). The significant difficulty with this approach would be the design of the UI.

A second suggestion, much easier to integrate into your current system: allow labels to be associated with categories, including parent categories (multiple categories per label). When a transaction is categorized (whether automatically or manually) any associated labels are also applied. This would allow users to create something like a set of custom parent categories and--and this is the important thing--create budgets targeting those labels. Unfortunately, this solution, unlike my first suggestion, would not change the pie chart display, since that has to be built out of a set of non-overlapping parent categories totaling 100% of spending. But it should be possible for the set of histogram-type charts below the pie chart to be customized by users and to include labels as well as categories.

[mintfeedback]

**

Why not just have every category imaginable? All of them!
And then I can pick and choose which ones pertain to me based on my lifestyle (as part of my mint.com account setup).

**

[rklein]

I agree with the last post, either put all the categories imaginable (one that i would like to have is credit card payment)OR....just allow us to add and customize our own categories. This probably sounding like a broken record, but please take it into consideration.

[johnmblack]

OK I'm a CPA so this may be too much for "normal" people, but here are my suggestions:

"Shopping" is awfully broad. And arbitrary. I don't understand why DVDs are listed under "entertainment" but books are listed under "shopping". [...] I'd limit "Home" to Home Improvements, Home Maintenance (this will include both home services and materials related to maintenance), Home Insurance, Property Taxes, Mortgage/Rent. [...] I'd split "Shopping" into at a minimum 2 categories: Durable, and Non-Durable. [...] I'd probably have a category for "Food" with subs for groceries, restaurant dining, fast food dining, beverages, since groceries vs. dining out is a common thing for people to track, and beverages is a little nitpicky but if you add up all the happy hour &/or coffee break costs it's a common thing for people to cut back on when they're saving for something.
I think we need to be really careful here. It's possible to OVERcategorize something. (Sure, I could have 100 different categories in use, but then how useful would my pie chart be??) IMHO categorization should be about summarizing, not about adding detail. How much did I spend on things I really need, vs. things I didn't? When you're trying to trim a budget, you usually don't ask yourself how you can buy less food for the family, rather you try to see what things are less-necessary and start trimming there. It's for this reason that I think the current Category list is so useless. Food and Dining should never go together, and here they are actually the category header. Food for the dinner table is a necessary operational expense, but dining is an unnecessary luxury. At least for most people.

And why list Groceries under a "Food" header? Who here goes to a supermarket and only buys Food items? No, with today's supermarkets, I'll spend half the bill on edible items, and the other half on necessary "household" supplies -- which here is listed under a totally different header. IMHO I consider "Food Groceries" and "Household Supplies Groceries" as indistinguishable.... they're both required for daily operation of a household, and they should be grouped together -- and separated from the group of things that are luxuries, like "Dining Out".

In summary, your category list (and many such category lists, even from your competitors) attempts to group things by their **composition**, when instead they should be grouped by their **usefulness**. Instead of grouping things that are eaten vs. not eaten, you should group things that are necessary vs. not necessary. I truly believe that if more people arranged their budgets this way that they would be able to manage them better.

This might be too complicated, but it would be convenient if all ATM line items were automatically split so that any odd amount was charged to bank fees and the rest was a transfer to cash. I don't know of any ATMs anywhere that give out $1 bills or change, so an ATM charge of $51.50 would go $1.50 fee/$50 cash, $102.00 would be $2 fee/$100 cash.
OMG yes! This would be one of those low-hanging-fruit things you could do that would yield high user-impact. I don't know of any financial mgt site or software that does this. I've been lazy about it and don't split these transactions, but if I did I might see how much I throw away in bank fees, and that might change my w/d habits. But I would never take the time to manually split them all myself.

I'm actually not too keen on breaking them down into the master and sub categories like that. I find just one level of categories better, especially when trying to use both categories and tags.
Couldn't agree more. As a list of choices grows beyond 7-10 items, the speed in making the choice (and to some extent, the accuracy) begins to diminish (read Jakob Nielsen and Donald Norman's writings.)

Bottom line: Don't try to predict the best category list. Just let us make our own.

[pelican]

Also, under the "Pets" category, when we take our pets to get cleaned we have "Pet Grooming", but under "Auto" if I take my car to the car wash I just have "Service/Parts" - and a car wash doesn't really fall under that category, or maybe it does?

I thought it might fall under a "Car Wash/Detail Service" category of some sort

[M.T.]

I also would like a "Public Transportation" category.

[TIinPA]

I'd really like to see an income category for transfers between my own accounts. Right now mint can't seem to decide whether "transfers" are expenses or income since they could be either as it stands now.

[johnmblack]

I'd really like to see an income category for transfers between my own accounts. Right now mint can't seem to decide whether "transfers" are expenses or income since they could be either as it stands now.


Actually, true Transfers should never be categorized as income OR expense. Most of us probably do our accounting on an income/expense basis, and in that model, a transfer between accounts should not influence the breakdown -- imagine you spent $100 on food, $100 on gas, and then transferred $300 to another account. When you run your report, do you really want the transfer to show as 60% of your spending on a pie chart, with food/gas as 20% each? No, obviously you spent 50% of your funds on food and 50% on gas.

[Tommy]

I agree that Mint should have lots of categories, but I should be able to customize my own category lists. If it can't do this, then I can't get an accurate picture of my spending the way I see it. This will hinder the "me vs. others" comparison, but that doesn't bother me.

I would prefer to get a clear picture of my finances than to know how I compare to others.

What if Mint kept the standardized broad categories, and allowed for more personalization within them. User could create new categories with in the broad ones and still be able to compare themselves with the Mint community in a broader sense.

[gnober]

Please add a category for the ff:

Night-outs (oh yeah, clubs/pubs and such. i alway go in one and would like an aggregate for this).

Transportation Sure you have gas expense.. What about Transpo. You know, for subway, taxi, etc fares? The system correctly shows MTA. Just needs to tag/categorize it as Subway/Bus fare. Shout out to New Yorkers!

[vodreaux]

Add the following Categories: Subscription

SubCategory: Magazines, Newspaper, Journals, Etc!

[tphillip]

I'd like to see all the same categories for motorcycles that you have for autos, including subcategories.

[Ophelia]

I agree with:
Standardized Categories, Customizable Sub-categories. The Categories can serve for the comparing to others' spending thing (for those who care about it), and the Sub-categories can help people inform their budgets from their worldview. (Also, perhaps have "default" sub-categories that are the current ones, with Add New, Delete, and Rename/Edit features?)
Separating Food from Dining. Dining Out, Coffee, Alcohol, and Bars should be under Entertainment, and Groceries, Cleaning Supplies, Toiletries, and perhaps even Clothing should go under Personal Expenses or Daily Expenses or Daily Living, or something like that. (I really like the Necessary vs. Non-necessary Expenses split.)

I also REALLY want a Public Transportation Sub-Category. Could we re-name Auto as Transportation (simply because I don't have a car), and have Vehicle Expense Sub-categories and Public Transportation, and Taxis and whatnot, too?
(Of course, I usually pay my bus fare with Cash, so I would have to get money from an ATM, and then split the transaction so it would fit ... )

[ccoulson]

I would like a new high-level category called "Business Expenses." Then, within that, if I could create sub-categories to match how my company wants me to submit expenses - Air/Rail, Lodging, Rental Car, Meals, Entertainment, etc., that would be very cool.

[mburdsall]

I agree. Today I created a sub category for that purpose under travel.

What I would also like to see is an income category for busienss reimbursements and then a reporting graph that would allow me to reconcile the income and expense category.