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[GH-ISSUE #7681] Hidden category amounts are excluded from monthly totals in Tracking Budget mode but not in Envelope Budget mode #117542
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Originally created by @x-rous on GitHub (May 2, 2026).
Original GitHub issue: https://github.com/actualbudget/actual/issues/7681
What happened?
I am using Actual Budget in Tracking Budget mode.
I noticed that income, expenses, and budget targets assigned to hidden categories are excluded from the monthly totals in Tracking Budget mode.
For a long time, I assumed this was intentional behavior. However, after testing the same scenario in Envelope Budget mode, I found that amounts assigned to hidden categories are not excluded from the monthly totals there.
I am not sure whether this is a bug or an intentional design decision, can someone clarify?
How can we reproduce the issue?
Where are you hosting Actual?
Docker
What browsers are you seeing the problem on?
Chrome
Operating System
Windows 11
@x-rous commented on GitHub (May 2, 2026):
Update / Additional Context
I found the previous feature request that introduced this behavior:
Based on that request, hidden categories were intentionally excluded from monthly totals in Tracking Budget mode.
However, I still believe this behavior is problematic and potentially misleading.
The main concern is that hiding a category does not mean the historical income or expenses assigned to that category no longer existed. For example, if the budget summary shows that I saved
$5,000, but there is a hidden category with$2,000of expenses excluded from the total, then the real saved amount is actually$3,000.That can give users an inaccurate view of their monthly financial result.
From the documentation, hidden categories appear to be described as categories the user no longer wants to use or see regularly. That makes sense from a UI/organization perspective, but it does not necessarily justify excluding historical amounts from previous months where those categories were actively used.
If users need a way to exclude specific categories from monthly totals, I think that should be handled through a separate explicit setting, and even with such a setting, you should exclude it from the "spent vs. budgeted" but you cannot excluded it form the month results (total income - total expenses).
If a user just wants to track some money and not have it affect the budget, then using Off Budget accounts with tags is the way to go.
At minimum, if the current behavior is kept, I believe the documentation should clearly explain that in Tracking Budget mode, hidden categories are excluded from monthly totals (both results and budget variance) and can affect the displayed saved / overspent result.
Suggested Solution
The two settings should have separate meanings:
This would make the behavior intentional, transparent, and easier to document.
@youngcw commented on GitHub (May 2, 2026):
Since this isn't a bug ill close the issue. Hiding categories is for categories you seldom use or no longer use. If you don't want to see a category you can collapse a group.
Hidden categories can still be included in reports for a more detailed view of your expenses.
You are free to add in a feature request if you want.