How to split a supermarket receipt across categories

Open the transaction in Money by Zaweba and use its split dialog. There you divide the one payment into parts, each with its own category and amount, so a £64 supermarket shop can become groceries for the food and household for the cleaning things. Each part then counts in its own category in budgets and reports.

The bank only ever sees one payment to the supermarket. A split is how you tell Money what that payment was actually for.

When a split is worth doing

Not every shop needs one. If almost everything in a trip is food, filing the whole amount under groceries is close enough for most purposes. Splits earn their keep when a single payment mixes things you track separately: a big weekly shop that includes school uniform or a birthday present, a chemist where you bought medicine and toiletries, or a hardware shop where part of the spend belongs to your sole trader business rather than the house.

They also matter if you set budgets. A grocery budget that keeps tipping over because it's quietly absorbing household items and gifts won't tell you much. Split those out and both budgets become meaningful.

Splitting a payment

Find the payment in the account's register and select it. Open the split dialog from the transaction. You'll see the total, which has to stay the same, and space to add parts.

Add the first part with its category and amount, for example Household, Groceries, with the food total from the receipt. Add the next part, perhaps a household items category, with its amount. Keep going until the parts add up to the whole payment. The receipt itself is the easiest guide: many supermarket receipts group items by department, and you only need rough totals per category, not every line.

Save the transaction. The register still shows one row with the full amount, because that's what left the bank, but behind it the parts are filed separately.

How splits show up in reports and budgets

In the Spending by category report, each part counts in its own category, so the groceries slice and the household slice both include their share of that shop. Budget bars work the same way, so a split part counts against the budget for its own category. If one of the categories is a subcategory, its amount also rolls up into the parent's budget, as every subcategory does.

Refunds behave sensibly too. If you take something back and the refund lands in an expense category, it reduces spending in that category rather than being counted as income.

Splits in imported files

Statements downloaded as CSV or OFX arrive as single payments, so any splitting is up to you. QIF files are different: if a QIF file already contains split transactions, such as an export from another finance program, Money brings them in as splits, with their parts intact.

Habits that keep splits useful

Keep the receipt until the statement is imported. Splitting from memory a fortnight later is guesswork. Some people keep receipts in a pot by the computer and do a quick split session once a week, straight after importing.

Don't over-split. Two or three parts per shop is usually plenty; a split for every aisle makes the register tiring to read and doesn't make reports much more useful. And remember that payee rules file a payment by its payee, so the supermarket's rule still decides the category of an unsplit shop. Splits are the exceptions you add on top.

Done this way, your categories in Money by Zaweba reflect what the money really went on, not just where it was spent.