What Are Tags?
Tags represent labels that can be customized and that can help you track your transactions in QuickBooks. For now, you can use tags for your invoices, expenses, and bills.
Grouping tags together allows you to run reports and see how specific areas of your business are doing. For example, you are a wedding planner and you want to see the net result for each wedding that you planned.
Tags do not influence your books and they track things at the transaction level. QuickBooks offers some other grouping options, like categories or classes. Categories are used usually by accountants and they are reflected in the chart of accounts. Classes are used to group income and expenses for job costing, budgeting or fund accounting.
Creating Tag Groups
First of all, you should create groups to put tags into. You should follow the steps below:
- Go to Settings and choose Tags
- Click on the New button and then Tag group
- Choose a name for the group
- Choose a color from the dropdown menu
- When you’re done, click Save
- Click on the New button and then Tag group
For example, let’s say that you run a beauty products company and you want to see which product has the best sales. You can do this by creating a group called “products”. Then create tags for specific beauty products and add them to your products group.
Create New Tags and Tag Transactions
You can create tags while you’re working on a form, like an invoice or expense:
- In the Tags field, enter the name of the tag you want to create, then select + Add
- Select one of your groups to add the tag to it
This creates the tag and tags the form. You can also add existing tags to forms, by simply entering the name in the Tag field and selecting it. You can add as many tags as you’d like to one specific form, but you can only choose one tag per tag group.
Get Insights from Tags
In order to see the Profit and Loss report for each tag or tag group:
- Go to Banking, then select Tags
- Find a group or a tag on the list
- Under the Action column, select Run report
Since tags and the tag groups have both money in and money out transactions, you’ll see how everything in the tag or in the group affects your bottom line.
Edit Tags, Tag Groups
- Go to Settings and select Tags
- Find the tag or tag group you want to edit
- Under the Action column, select the Run report dropdown, then select Edit tag or Edit group
Turn Off Tags
- Choose Settings
- Select Account and Settings
- Click on the Sales tab
- In the Sales form content section, turn off Tags, next select Save
- Select the Expenses tab
- In the Bills and Expenses section, turn off the Show Tags field on expense and purchase forms, and select Save
- Click Done
Tags are an easy and useful method to have more efficient financial reports.
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This material is for informational purposes only. It does not constitute tax, legal or accounting advice.