Ultimately it comes down to how much effort you want to spend categorising spending, but there are many levels of granularity and orthogonal dimensions to slice against
This level of granularity probably isn't worth it to most people, but I found it useful as an exercise to do once because it opened my eyes to insights about my expenses I never would have thought about otherwise. And if there were software that made this super easy to do (<1 minute per entry), I might still be doing it.
In NL we got the banks to allow exporting [YOUR] data kicking and screaming. Nothing real time sadly but at least it's a thing now.
I would like to force merchants to do the same.
Enforce some protocol that doesn't suck and it should take 0 seconds.
Imagine the things we could build and how many people we could fire.
It’s annoying to do in Canada where sales tax is not included. The fly in the ointment is that certain categories are tax-exempt (essential foods, kids’ clothing) but not others (prepackaged foods, adult clothing).
If your shopping trip is across three or more categories (gifts, clothing, food), you’ll have to figure out which items were tax-exempt before you can do any subdivision.