Hate Mint Categories?

[katylava]

Mint does a great job of automagically categorizing everything, but I'm at the point where I just need *fewer* categories in order to really tell what's going on with my money. I also hate navigating through the category hierarchy to find what I'm looking for... that's way too much work.

So, I came up with a hackish solution. In 'Uncategorized' I started adding all my own categories, prefixing them with a dash, and keeping them all lowercase so I can distinguish them from Mint categories. Now I only have to go to 'Uncategorized' to find all the categories I'm using. Using that in combination with setting up my own rules has made it a lot easier.

Problems with this solution:
* The 'edit categories' box breaks when you have a lot of categories, but I can deal with that.
* I also lose the super-categories, but those made monitoring my budget a little too complicated for me.
* On 'Trends', at first I see one big 'Uncategorized' pie, but once I click on it I can see the breakdown by my custom categories.

[RyanD]

I'm having to do the exact same thing. Mint has WAY to many categories and I'm trying to a find a work around. At this point I'm just going to work entirely out of the custom category section until they give us more flexibility to manage my categories.

[NoCatharsis]

Yeah better category management would be terrific. Mint, please please work on this?

Secondly, the default categories that Mint automatically assigns to all new transactions is not very intelligent. For instance, let's say I make my own category called "Eating Out" instead of using Mint's "Fast Food" category and I have a transaction with McDonald's. I have to manually change the category to "Eating Out" every time I have a transaction with McDonald's. Why can Mint not figure out that when I eat at McDonald's, I'd rather use "Eating Out" category instead of their proprietary category?

[trf]

When looking at the transations page, if you select "Edit Details", I have found a default rule to "always categorize Mcdonalds as Eating Out", if that is something I have changed manually. By activating the tule (checking the box) it should automatically catergorize it the way you want. Hope this helps.