Suppliers and categories on a transaction

What you are going to do

You are going to register your suppliers, organise your income and expense categories into two levels, and start filling those two fields in on every transaction. After that, "R$ 1,200 in Maintenance" becomes "R$ 1,200 in Maintenance → Pool, paid to Clorolar".

Two things to know before you start

A supplier is never deleted, only deactivated. When a supplier leaves your life you deactivate them: they disappear from the lists on new transactions and stay in your history, because your old expenses still need to say who you paid.

A category does not really disappear either. The screen calls the action "delete", but the category is kept and can be reactivated. What changes is that it stops being offered on new transactions.

Step by step

1. Register your first supplier — go to Settings → Suppliers → click "New supplier". Only the name is required. Once saved, they appear in the list with the status Active.

2. Add the tax number, if you have it — the field accepts a personal or a company tax number, with or without punctuation: typing the separators or only the digits works the same. The field is optional, and a supplier without one is accepted.

3. Open your categories — go to Settings → Categories. You already have a ready-made list, marked as System. The ones you create are marked as Custom.

4. Create a top-level category — click "New category", give it a name and choose the kind (income or expense). It appears in the table with the status Active.

5. Create a subcategory — on the row of the top-level category, click the new-subcategory button. The kind is inherited from the parent and cannot be changed there. Once saved, the subcategory appears indented under its parent.

6. Use both fields on a transaction — go to Transactions and open a new or an existing one. The form now has Supplier and, just below it, Category and Subcategory. The subcategory list only offers the children of the category you picked.

7. Create a supplier without leaving the form — if they do not exist yet, type the name in the Supplier field and click "Create supplier". They are created and already linked to the transaction you are filling in.

Practical tip

You can have "Pool" under "Maintenance" and another "Pool" under "Cleaning supplies" at the same time. Identical names under different parents are allowed on purpose, because in a report they read as "Maintenance → Pool" and "Cleaning supplies → Pool" and never get confused.

What the system refuses is two "Pool" under the same parent. And when that happens it does not just give you an error: if the repeated category is one you deleted earlier, a Reactivate the existing category button appears. Almost always that is what you wanted — it already existed and had been taken out of circulation.

Careful when you delete a top-level category

Deleting a parent removes it and all of its children from the transaction selector. The children stay active in the register, which is why they show up in the table with an Unavailable badge explaining that the parent category has been deleted. It is not a fault: the system is telling you that the subcategory exists but nobody can pick it while the parent is out.

If you only meant to retire the parent and keep the children, move the children to another parent before deleting.

Common mistakes

Looking for a deactivated supplier and thinking they vanished — switch the status filter to Inactive or All.

Being surprised that an old transaction still shows a deactivated supplier. That is deliberate: the old link still holds, and the form tells you that changing it is optional.

Deleting a top-level category expecting the children to stay available. They do not.