Categories and counterparties
A category answers the question “on what”, a counterparty — the question “to whom”. Every transaction always has a category and optionally a counterparty and a note. Well-tuned categories are the foundation of useful analytics.
Starter set
When you create your first book, Svodly fills in about 50 ready-made categories: “Food”, “Transport”, “Cafés”, “Subscriptions”, “Salary”, “Gifts”, “Taxes” and so on. Each comes with an icon and a color from a single palette.
This set is a starting point. You can rename, delete or change the icon of any of them. If something is unnecessary — delete it without hesitation; if something is missing — add your own.
You don't have to create a new category in advance: you can create one right from the transaction form. Start typing a name in the category field — if there are no matches, Create “…” appears. On the phone there is also a Create a new category button under the tree, and both lead to the full “New category” sheet — the same one that opens from this screen: the name is already filled in from your query, and you pick the icon, colour and parent right away. After “Save” the app brings you back to the transaction form with the new category already selected.
For transfers creating a category is not available — transfer categories are system ones. A counterparty, a project and a tag are created from the phone the same way: a full creation sheet with the name pre-filled and a return to the transaction form.
Hierarchy
Categories are nested, with no limit on depth. You can have “Food” as a parent and under it “Groceries”, “Cafés”, “Delivery”, and if you like — yet another level inside. Child categories inherit the parent's color but pick their own icon.
In analytics you can look at both the top level (“Food — ₽32,000”) and expand it (“of which 18,000 is groceries, 9,000 is cafés”). The parent's total automatically gathers all the children.
If the “Food” category is a parent and has subcategories, then direct transactions into “Food” are also allowed and go into the “other” group. There's no need to create “Food → Other” by hand.
Icons and colors
Each category is an icon from the Lucide set and a color from the Svodly palette (12 pairs of shades for the light and dark themes, fine-tuned by a designer). This is done so the categories and analytics screens stay readable even with a hundred categories — no bright reds next to crimsons and burgundies.
- Tap a category in the list to open editing.
- Choose the icon by meaning — search by words inside the picker.
- The color — any one from the palette; the pairs are assembled automatically.
Counterparties
A counterparty is a specific person or organization. “Magnit” is a counterparty of the “Groceries” category. “My son's school” is a counterparty of the “Education” category. “Ivan” is a counterparty of the “Debts” category.
Counterparties appear automatically as you enter a transaction: you type a name in the “To” field — it becomes a new counterparty, and next time Svodly will suggest it in the hints. You can also add them in advance in the Counterparties section.
Counterparty INN
The counterparty card has an “INN” field — now in a personal book too, not only in business. Enter 10 or 12 digits: Svodly validates the checksum and warns “The checksum doesn't match” if you made a typo. The INN helps link transactions to the same recipient — including during bank-statement import, where counterparties are matched precisely by INN. The field is optional — you can leave it empty.
Autofill from the EGRUL by INN and the extended details (OGRN, KPP, address) remain a business book feature.
The category fills itself in
You don't have to pick a category by hand every time. For a familiar counterparty Svodly suggests its most frequent category from history — that works with no setup at all. And to state the link explicitly (“Pyaterochka” → “Groceries”) or to sort transactions by words in the description, create an auto-categorization rule on the neighbouring “Auto-category rules” tab (on the phone — the “Auto-categorization rules” item in the “Categories” header).
Why separate them from the category
A category is a typical line of spending (“Communications”), while a counterparty is a specific recipient (“MTS”, “Megafon”, “Yota”). In reports it's handy to look at both: “how much went on communications in total” and “how much exactly MTS was this year”.
In business books and when keeping books together, counterparties are especially useful: “office landlord”, “tax office”, “kindergarten” — these are specific entities you need separate reports for.
From a reference straight into a filtered journal
On the computer and on the web every row of “Categories”, “Counterparties”, “Projects” and “Tags” has an Open transactions button — it opens the journal already filtered by that entity and the period of the reference screen (“month” becomes a “This month” chip). Filtering by a parent category includes its subcategories — the same logic as the chips in the journal itself.
Clicking the row itself still opens it for editing. The button appears on hover, and on a tablet it is always visible.
The references themselves are collected into a collapsible “References” group at the bottom of the sidebar on the computer and on the web, and into a row of the same name in the sections menu on the phone.
Deletion and merging
You can delete a category or a counterparty if they have no transactions. If they do, Svodly will offer to move them into another category and then delete. This way transactions aren't lost and you can safely reorganize the list.
Merging two categories (“Cafés” and “Restaurants” → “Cafés and restaurants”) is the same steps: create the new one, move transactions from both old ones, delete the old ones.
Where to go next
- Auto-categorization — rules that fill the category in for you.
- Transactions — how categories and counterparties work together.
- Budgets — setting limits by category and counterparty.
- Analytics — what you can see across breakdowns.
- Tags — free-form labels on top of categories and the system “Not counted”.