Designating an expense category as essential or discretionary?

Question

As part of the budgeting process, I would like to explicitly designate an expense category, or sub-category, as either essential (non-discretionary) or discretionary. The objective is to be able to adjust a budget taking those expense types into account. How can this be simply and usefully done?

Jim_Harman · Accepted Answer

One way to do this would be to set up Category Groups. You could call them Essential and Discretionary, then assign each expense category to one of those groups.

Then on the Planning > Budgets page, your expenses will be grouped and subtotaled accordingly.