How do y'all keep track of purchases at stores that fall into multiple categories? If you go to Costco or Walmart and buy groceries and toiletries and diapers, do you manually divide them up and enter them into <whatever you are using>? I am thinking in terms of e.g. Mint, which tracks spending based on categories and just sees the transaction, and I don't have the bandwidth to de-automate this process.

I have an "amazon" category for subscribe & save. If there is a set of items that you get on a regular basis, and are not looking to optimize spending among those categories, there is no need to break it down. But if I end up walking out of costco with a new outdoor furniture set, I would take the effort split in to the furniture category.

i use the ynab split function to categorize the purchase

You can probably also split a transaction in mint, no?

probably

Mint does provide splitting as well. I don't think there's a way to automate it. As @acceptable-angle-23240 said, there are some that may not need to be split so your can focus on just splitting specific transactions.

If its a large difference I would split it out, but for the most part I just group them together, so that set of windshield wipers I got at Costco for $20 falls under Grocery since I mostly just buy food and home goods there.

So, redefine diapers (or items regularly purchased at Costco) as "groceries" and cheshbon them as part of my grocery budget. That makes sense.

This is the annoying part of budgeting. Each month I need to open my Amazon order history to see which category each item falls in. Same for Target and Sam's Club.

i call all consumables “groceries” which simplifies things. my amazon purchases go to a generic “shopping” category, which I classify more if I have time. amazon purchases over >$x00 get routed to groceries automatically, because those are almost shopping orders.