Basics

Categories & tags

Two complementary tools for slicing your spending — one structured, one free-form.

Categories vs. tags

Flow gives you two ways to label a transaction. They're not the same thing:

  • Category — at most one per transaction, optional. Categories are the backbone of reports: "Groceries", "Rent", "Coffee", "Salary".
  • Tags — zero, one, or many per transaction. Free-form labels for extra context: "trip tokyo", "reimbursable", "gift". No # prefix needed — type whatever you want.

💡 Rule of thumb

If you'd want a slice in your spending pie chart, it's a category. If you'd want to ask "show me everything related to X", it's a tag.

Creating a category

  1. Open the Profile tab and tap Categories.
  2. Tap the + button.
  3. Tap the icon to Change icon, type a Category name, and pick a color with Change color.
  4. Tap the ✓ at the top right to save.

Change icon offers three kinds of icon: Icon (searchable Symbols from Google's Material Symbols, plus Brands & Logos for banks, shops, and services), Emoji/Letter, and Image (pick or paste your own). The same picker is used for accounts.

Creating a new category, with name, icon, and color fields visible.
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Picking good categories

A common mistake is creating dozens of fine-grained categories on day one. Start small — 8-12 broad buckets that cover your real-life spending — and split them only when a single category gets uncomfortably large in your reports.

Tags

Tags appear on the transaction edit page below the category picker. Tap to add either an existing tag or type a new name. Tags are global: a tag created on one transaction is available everywhere.

The three tag types

  • Regular tag — a free-form label. The default. Use it for anything: trip tokyo, reimbursable, gift, kid, partner.
  • Contact tag — a person. Useful for "who did I split this with" or "who owes me money".
  • Location tag — a place. Flow suggests location tags automatically when you're within about 50 m of a place you've used before — based on either the transaction's saved location or your device's current GPS reading.
The new tag screen with the Generic, Location, and Person type chips at the top.
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ℹ️ Location suggestions need geolocation on

Proximity suggestions only work if you turn geolocation on under Profile → Preferences → Transaction location (and grant Flow location permission). Without it, location tags work like regular tags — you can still create and use them, you just won't get proximity-based suggestions.

💡 New in v0.22.0 — suggestions also use your live location

Suggestions now fire when you edit a transaction too, not just at creation, and Flow considers your device's current GPS in addition to whatever location the transaction was saved with. Open an old, locationless transaction at the same coffee shop and you'll still be offered the right tag.

Using categories & tags in reports

Both categories and tags become filters on the Reports screen and can be saved as filter presets for one-tap recall.

ℹ️ Renaming & merging

Editing a category or tag updates every transaction that uses it instantly. To merge two tags, edit each transaction with the old tag, swap it for the new one, and delete the old tag from the tags page.
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