# Categorizing work

### Configuring investment categories

Investment categories are fully customizable. Before you create your own categories, we highly recommend reading our blog post on [**balancing engineering investment**](https://www.swarmia.com/blog/balancing-engineering-investments/)**,** sharing best practices on how to think of these categories.

[**See a detailed guide on how to configure investment categories**](https://help.swarmia.com/getting-started/configuration/investment-balance) in Swarmia.

### Categorizing work

Swarmia comes with a couple of handy tools that help you [**categorize work**](https://help.swarmia.com/getting-started/configuration/investment-balance) in minutes. You can [**set up automated filters to categorize work**](https://help.swarmia.com/readme) based on certain criteria (for example, a label or a pull request title prefix) or [**toggle on the automatic categorization**](https://help.swarmia.com/getting-started/configuration/investment-balance/automatic-categorization). These systems also work seamlessly together, so you may combine rules-based categorization with Swarmia's AI categorization.

Alternatively, you can also **link issues and pull requests to investment categories manually** by selecting them anywhere in the app.

To get the full benefit out of Swarmia's investment insights, we recommend [**linking pull requests to Issues**](https://help.swarmia.com/getting-started/configuration/linking-pull-requests-to-issues). There's also a [**working agreement**](https://app.swarmia.com/working-agreements/a5fe9951-ee0f-405a-b759-c67a95687bd2) that help teams do that.