Tags vs. categories

[ATark]

I'm just hoping this sparks some discussion:

One thing that would help me out a lot would be breaking a transaction into multiple tags and completely eliminating categories. Lunch that I buy at the office where I'm going to be reimbursed might have the tags "Food, Lunch, Catering, Work, Reimbursed, Recruiting". However, lunch that I buy on vacation might just be "Food, Lunch, Vacation, Personal". Then I can do a simple search to see how much I'm spending on Food while on Vacation vs. at Work vs. at Home or how much I'm spending on Work/Lunches or even Work/Coffee

I know this would could throw off the simplicity of the Spending Trends and maybe Google just has me addicted to tags/labels, but I find them a lot easier for searching and organizing than categories.


Also, just an interesting point...the search "tag:Food" brings up all the transactions I've labeled with Food, but "label:Food" brings up any occurrence of Food, including store names and subcategories like Groceries. It seems like there were two different teams coding the syntax on tags (labels).

[mlebarron]

You can already give a transaction multiple "tags" or "labels"

Can you elaborate a little more?

Spending Trends doesn't seem to notice labels at all though, it just seems to go by categories.

[mlebarron]

Also, just an interesting point...the search "tag:Food" brings up all the transactions I've labeled with Food, but "label:Food" brings up any occurrence of Food, including store names and subcategories like Groceries. It seems like there were two different teams coding the syntax on tags (labels).

This seems to be an interface quirk where the "Label" dropdown is searched for by using "tag"

searching for "label:" seems to look everywhere, merchant name, category, and tag (or label).

[ATark]

You can already give a transaction multiple "tags" or "labels"

Can you elaborate a little more?

Spending Trends doesn't seem to notice labels at all though, it just seems to go by categories.

Thanks for the reply.

I think you hit my point exactly - currently, tags serve little to no purpose besides search, but they have the ability to do a lot more.

I understand how the current build works, I'm not looking for a workaround. I've just seen a lot of people having trouble with categories fitting their needs and wanted to see what other people thought.

[mlebarron]

For the most part I don't use the subcategories myself. I use the big general categories, and then tag/label things with the specifics.

I think the only subcategories I use are Restaurants and Groceries.

I agree on eliminating categories to a point. I'm much more used to tags. However, like I said, I'm using some of the categories now, although there's no reason they couldn't be tags instead of categories.

On one hand, I like the option of using categories and/or tags, but on the other it adds a level of complexity that I'm not sure needs to be there.

Although, reporting based on tags seems like it's a necessity (even if categories stick around), otherwise it's sort of a useless feature.

(side note: if this seems out of whack or rambling... I'm sick today so I may not be thinking or typing straight)

[Damon]

Note: I would expect some rapid changes in this arena very shortly...

[mlebarron]

oooo... changes :)

I'll be on the lookout!