Budgeting has a familiar failure mode. You set up twenty categories at the start of the month, full of resolve. By the third week, three of them have blown through their limits. Everything turns red. You feel bad. You stop looking.
The problem is rarely the spending. It is the resolution. Twenty categories means twenty things to track, twenty things to fail at, twenty boxes that turn red on a normal month with normal noise.
A better default is five or six categories that are large enough to absorb a typical month: Housing, Groceries, Transport, Discretionary, Subscriptions, Savings. If your discretionary spending swings ±30% from one month to the next, set the budget where the average month lands and accept that some months will be over, some under. That is what an average is.
Check in monthly, not daily. A monthly check-in gives you trends — three months of overshoot in the same category is signal. A daily check-in gives you noise.
And finally: budgets are not a moral framework. Overspending in one category does not make you a bad person. It usually means the budget is wrong, the month was unusual, or both. Adjust and move on. The point of tracking is to know — not to punish.