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Categories are a simple way to classify what your spending and income is for, independently of the GL account it posts to. Where the chart of accounts answers “which ledger account?”, a category answers “what kind of activity?” — Operating Expenses, Payroll, Rent & Utilities, Marketing, and so on. You tag expenses and bill lines with a category so that later you can group, filter and report on spending by the buckets that make sense to your business. You’ll find this at: /accounting/categories — in the left navigation under Accounting → Categories.
📷 Screenshot: Categories list showing the built-in defaults plus any custom categories — to be added.

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What categories classify

A category is an expense/income classification that you attach to transactions:
  • Expenses carry a category, so you can see, for example, how much went to Marketing this quarter.
  • Bill lines carry a category, so each line of a supplier bill can be classified separately.
Categories are organised as a tree — a category can have a parent, letting you build groupings such as Operating Expenses → Office Supplies. They also optionally carry default GL accounts so that picking a category can pre-fill the expense or income account on a transaction.
Categories vs. the chart of accounts. A category is a reporting/classification label; it is not itself a ledger account. The actual debit and credit still land on real accounts. The optional default accounts on a category are just a convenience that suggests the right ledger account when you choose that category.

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Multi-business note

Categories are stored per accounting book. Each business (book) has its own category list. Switch the active business with the business switcher before adding or editing categories — you only see and affect the current book’s categories. The built-in defaults (below) appear in every book.

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Built-in default categories

Every book comes with ten ready-to-use categories so you can start classifying immediately without setting anything up: These system default categories cannot be edited or deleted — if you try, Hitaji blocks it with “System default categories cannot be edited / deleted”. They are always active and always appear at the top of the list. You can, of course, add your own categories alongside them.
A default category only becomes a “real” stored record the first time it is actually used on a transaction; until then it lives as a built-in. This is transparent to you — it simply works.

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Creating a category

  1. Go to Accounting → Categories (/accounting/categories).
  2. Click Add Category (or the equivalent create action).
  3. Fill in the fields below.
  4. Save.
📷 Screenshot: Create-category form with name, parent, and default-account fields — to be added.

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Fields

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Validation you may hit

  • Duplicate name — “Category with name ’…’ already exists”. Names must be unique within the book (and cannot duplicate a default).
  • Bad parent — “Parent category not found” if the parent does not exist in this book, or “Category cannot be its own parent”.
  • Wrong account type — a default expense account must be an Expense account, and a default income account must be an Income account, both belonging to the current book. Otherwise the save is rejected.

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Editing a category

Open a category and change its name, description, parent, default accounts, sort order or active flag. The same uniqueness and account-type rules apply as on create. Remember: the ten built-in defaults cannot be edited.

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Deleting a category

Categories are soft-deleted (hidden, not physically removed) so historical transactions keep their classification. Before a category can be deleted, Hitaji runs three safety checks and blocks deletion if any fail:
  1. It is a built-in default — defaults can never be deleted.
  2. It has child categories — “Cannot delete category with child categories. Delete children first.” Remove or re-parent the children, then delete.
  3. It is in use — if the category is used on any expense or bill line, deletion is blocked with a count, e.g. “Cannot delete category that is used in 4 expenses…”. Re-categorise those transactions first.
This guarantees you can never orphan a transaction or break the category tree by deleting.

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Access & permissions

  • Viewing categories requires the accounting:read scope.
  • Creating, editing, and deleting categories is available to users with accounting write access in the book.