Every spending category in Piere belongs to a parent category — for example, Groceries and Restaurants both live under Food & Dining. Piere lets you decide, for each parent category, how detailed you want your budget to be. There are three ways to track:
The three ways to budget a category group #
- Big picture (parent category) — one budget for the whole group. Example: Food & Dining gets $800 a month, and that covers everything inside it. The card shows a single progress bar, and your subcategory spending is listed inside it for reference. Cards in this mode carry a PARENT badge.
- Detailed (sub-category) — a budget for each subcategory you choose. Example: Groceries gets $400 and Restaurants gets $250, each tracked with its own row and progress bar, rolling up into the parent card’s total. Cards in this mode carry a SUB-CATEGORIES badge.
- Full control (hybrid) — both at once: a cap on the parent category plus budgets for subcategories inside it. Example: Food & Dining is capped at $800, with Groceries and Restaurants each budgeted within it. Cards in this mode carry a PARENT + SUBS badge.
A parent category you haven’t budgeted at all shows a NOT BUDGETED badge with your spending summarized — tap “Budget this group” to start tracking it.
Choosing when you create your budget #
When Piere builds your budget, it asks “How detailed should your budget be?” — pick Big picture, Detailed, or Full control and the proposed budget is drafted at that level. You can still mix levels per category group afterwards.
Switching an individual category group #
- On a parent-level card, tap + Track Subcategory to start budgeting individual subcategories inside that group.
- On a sub-category card, tap + Track Parent Category to add an overall cap on the group (that’s the hybrid setup).
- From Track a new category (the Budget page’s (…) menu or the + button), the level you tap the (+) on is the level you’ll budget: tap it next to a parent category to budget the whole group, or next to a subcategory to budget just that one.
Reading the cards: each card’s amounts line shows what you’ve spent against what you budgeted (e.g. $250 / $800) alongside how far under or over you are (e.g. $550 under). You can pick which of the two leads on the card in Budget Settings under Top line budget category card number.
Stopping tracking: on a hybrid card, stopping the group budget removes only the parent cap — your subcategory budgets survive. On a sub-category card, stopping tracking removes that group’s subcategory budgets.
Availability #
Sub-category budgeting is available on every plan. Parent-level and hybrid budgeting are Piere Platinum features.
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