Reading Your Workspace's Spending Categories
The eight fixed categories Finance uses to track workspace spending, and why they're a flat list rather than a customizable chart of accounts.
Every expense you log in Finance gets assigned to one of eight categories: Marketing, Operations, Salaries, Infrastructure, Software, Travel, Office, and Other. That's the complete list — it's fixed, not something you extend or rename from a settings page.
Why a fixed list instead of custom categories
Tools built for tax filing or formal bookkeeping — Wave, FreshBooks, and similar — typically let you define your own expense categories so they map cleanly onto tax line items or an accountant's chart of accounts. Finance isn't trying to be that tool. It's a lightweight way for a workspace to see where its own operating spend is going, week to week, without setting up a category structure first. Eight categories cover the shape of most team spending without asking anyone to design a taxonomy before they can log a single expense.
What each category is for, in practice
- Marketing — ad spend, campaign tools, sponsorships
- Operations — day-to-day running costs that don't fit elsewhere
- Salaries — payroll and contractor payments tracked as workspace spend
- Infrastructure — hosting, servers, and the technical backbone of the business
- Software — subscriptions and tooling
- Travel — trips, transit, lodging
- Office — physical space, supplies, equipment
- Other — the catch-all for anything that doesn't cleanly fit the seven above
What this means for budgets and reporting
Because the category list is fixed, every budget you set is scoped to one of these eight buckets, and every spending chart in Finance breaks down along the same lines. That consistency is useful for a quick read on where money is going, but if you need spend broken down by client, project, or cost center instead of by category, that structure doesn't exist here — you'd need to track that distinction outside Finance, at least for now.
If you outgrow eight categories — if your team genuinely needs a real chart of accounts with sub-accounts and custom groupings — that's a sign you've outgrown workspace spend tracking generally, and the Accounting app is the better fit.