Spending Summary
A spending summary totals transactions over a period, grouped either by vendor or by ledger category, while explicitly reporting how much spending was left out because it hasn't been categorized yet.
In short
"Where did the money go," answered two ways: by vendor (normalized descriptions, works regardless of categorization status) or by category (only sees transactions actually categorized, with the leftover amount reported separately rather than folded in silently). Income is excluded from both — it's a spending report, not a cash-flow one.
Also called: spending breakdown, spend by category
A spending summary totals outgoing transactions over a period, grouped either by vendor or by the account they were posted to. It answers how much and on what, which is a different question from show me everything.
The two groupings have different reliability, and the difference is structural. Grouping by vendor uses the description the bank supplied, so it works on any transaction. Grouping by category uses the account a transaction was posted to, so it can only see transactions someone has already categorized.
That makes the excluded figure the important number in the response rather than a caveat on it. A category summary with a large uncategorized remainder is not a picture of spending, it is a picture of the part already sorted, and reading it as the former is the specific mistake this design tries to prevent by reporting the exclusion outright.
Income is excluded entirely from both modes. A spending summary is about money leaving, so a deposit or a refund never appears, and it is not a net cash-flow figure.
What people get wrong
- Trusting a category total without checking the excluded-uncategorized figure reported alongside it — real spending can be missing from that total, not zero.
- Expecting a spending summary to include income or refunds — both grouping modes are spending-only by design.
- Confusing vendor grouping (works regardless of categorization status) with category grouping (only sees categorized transactions) as if they had the same limitations.
Common questions
- Why doesn't my category total match what I know I spent?
- Check the excluded-uncategorized figure — category grouping only totals transactions that have actually been categorized, and reports anything left out separately rather than folding it in as zero.
- Does a spending summary include income?
- No — both grouping modes exclude income entirely. It's specifically a spending report, not a net cash-flow one.
Machine-readable: /api/knowledge/concept:spending-summary