Hide/Remove Mint.com Default Categories
Posted by Stephen Schrauger on Friday, 6 March 2015I love Mint.com. I've been using it for over 5 years now, and it has helped me keep track of multiple bank accounts and credit cards, giving me one simple location to manage my finances.
One useful feature is the categorization of transactions. Mint lets you set up budgets based on categories and sub-categories. It has a nice graph showing how far along you are in the month in relation to your budget usage.
It comes with many categories by default, and you can add new sub-categories if you want to group a specific set of expenses. For example, I (unfortunately) have to pay tolls, which are automatically charged to my credit card; Mint makes it easy to track my monthly usage and help me plan for future months.
However, while you can add as many sub-categories as you want, you cannot remove any built-in default categories. I don't own a business, so the Business category and all its sub-categories are useless and serve to clutter my list of choices. Similarly, I don't have kids, another major category. While I do have plenty of Bills & Utilities, I don't have a Home Phone or Television bill, so those sub-categories will never apply.
I finally got fed up with the overload of choices, so I wrote a UserScript that allows you to hide specific categories or sub-categories. Go to the project page to see installation instructions for your particular desktop browser.
To modify your preferences, go into the 'Add/Edit Categories' popup, then click on 'Edit Hidden Categories'. All the categories will now have checkboxes. Simply check the box next to the category or sub-category, and it will be crossed out. Then, clicking either 'Save Hidden Categories' or "I'm Done" will cause them to be completely hidden.
Your preferences are saved on Mint's servers (using a custom sub-category), so your hidden categories will be automatically loaded on any computer that has the script installed. It doesn't actually delete the category from Mint's code, so they will show up on any computer without the script.
Any transactions marked with hidden categories will remain unchanged. If you ever want to restore a hidden category, simply go through the same steps and uncheck the checked box to bring it back.
If you find any problems with the code, feel free to leave a comment here or open a new issue on GitHub. If there are any features you want added, let me know! And if you are a fellow programmer, you can always fork the project; it is 100% free and open source.