A budget category is a label that classifies your income and expense transactions. These are the same categories you assign or review when you enter or download a transaction. The difference is that within a budget you choose which of those categories to track, and most people track only a few.
Categories can be nested. Groceries, Fast Food, and Coffee Shops are subcategories of the parent category Food & Dining, so you can budget at whichever level of detail you want.
How unbudgeted categories are counted
Your budget tracks amounts only for the categories you've added to it. A transaction assigned to a category you haven't budgeted doesn't get its own line in the budget.
Depending on how the rest of your budget is set up, the amount may still be included in a total:
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If you budgeted the parent category but not that subcategory, the amount rolls up into an Everything Else line inside the parent category.
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If you budgeted other categories in the same category group, the amount rolls up into the Everything Else line at the bottom of that group.
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If nothing else in the group is budgeted, the amount doesn't appear in your budget at all.
To see your spending across all categories regardless of your budget, go to the Spending tab or run a spending report. For more about how these lines behave, see Work with a budget.
Customize your categories
You can shape the category list to match how you actually earn and spend:
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Create new categories for expenses or income sources the defaults don't cover.
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Edit existing categories to rename them or change how they're organized.
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Delete categories you no longer use.
Changes you make here apply throughout Quicken, not only to your budget.