Categories Sheet and How You Can Use It

In Nordveld Flow, the Categories sheet is a simple yet very important part of your financial automation. It helps you track and categorise your everyday expenditures automatically. Here is how.

How Does the Categories Sheet Function?

When you connect your bank with Nordveld Flow, the add-on starts extracting transaction data automatically and populates it in the TX sheet. From there, it transfers and wraps up this transaction data in the Categories sheet.

It automatically creates most spending categories (like a budget calculator), so you don’t bother writing them by hand. However, if there are certain spending categories you don’t see amongst the automatically generated and you’d like to have them, you can also add them manually.

How to Use The Categories Sheet?

The first column is the categories “Name”. As the name suggests (pun intended), that’s how your spending categories are called. If you want to add a category different from the automatically generated, just scroll down the page until you reach an empty “Name” field. Then simply type in your desired name, for example, “Movie nights”. Also, you can easily rename any existing category by going into the corresponding cell and editing the text. For instance, if you don’t like to have a “Restaurants” category, you can rename it to “Dining out”. Next, you have the “Spending Guideline” column, which is essentially your expense budget cap for the corresponding category. If you don’t want to spend more than €250 on clothes monthly, you just type that number in the spending guideline cell next to the “Clothes & Accessories” field or however your category is called.

Last but certainly not least, you have the “Spent this month” column, which automatically tracks your expenditures for this month in each category (except the manually inserted) for all connected accounts. It works much like a personal or family budget app but without the boring manual inputs that come with most personal finance apps.

If you have the habit of paying with multiple debit or credit cards connected to different bank accounts, you shouldn’t worry as long as these accounts are connected to Nordveld Flow.

You don’t have to pull out your budgeting notebook or make a note on your phone every time you go out with friends to get some coffee or snacks. Nordveld Flow takes care of this for you. So you can fully enjoy the things you love and leave the boring stuff to computers.