QBO Tech Tip - Tags Are Underrated!
QBO Tags have so many cool uses, yet I don’t know many people who have embraced them.
Actually, tags are underrated in many cloud applications.
They are fabulous for organization in so many of our apps.
Notifications
Visibilty of “who’s on first”
Status of work
What/who is holding up work
Sort
Filter
Oversight
In some of our apps, like my practice management one - Financial Cents - tags can be automated, making them even more efficient and powerful.
In QBO though, tags are helpful for other reasons.
They can create a mini P&L
A great use case scenario is a project where you want to job cost, but not build out an actual project or sub-customer
You can categorize billable expenses without actually making them billable (which is a whole other kettle of fish)
Of note tags are put on an entire transaction, you can’t tag by line item
For my Canadian friends - tags include GST/HST which of course can skew the mini P&L
Tags are super useful here if there is a long date stretch of transactions, but you want to know how it affects a group of costs
A P&L by month or year is not useful for conference costs when the event fee is paid and the flight/hotel is booked 3 months before the meals and ground transportation expenses are incurred - but tags certainly are
They are useful for low-volume questions - such as “Need receipts”
You can categorize to COGS for example - keeping the financial statements accurate, and can deploy a report of tagged transactions
Customize and auto-send the report to the client, so they are reminded of what they need to get to you
::Edited::
I sent out an email of this blog, where I mentioned not to use Tags temporarily (when you will remove them once served their purpose) for a high volume of transactions.
I erroneously thought you couldn’t batch remove them.
A reader, David Perry, sent me back the how-to batch remove tags so I’m sharing it back out.
“You can batch remove tags, by going to Banking => Tags =>Select "See all untagged transactions" (counterintuitive I know, but from there, you can actually filter tags that are already tagged and batch update them and have some other filtering options by time periods, tags). It's somewhat limited, but it's definitely possible!”
I learned something new - and super useful today!
I love tags for keeping financial reports accurate, to keep moving on bookkeeping and creating reports that I can auto-nag clients with. I will now use them in higher-volume scenarios!
Thank you, David.
This is a super short list of tag uses. I haven’t even touched on grouping them.
Noodle through some scenarios where through you are having issues communicating QBO information to your clients, or where you want to track data outside of a set date range for example. See if Tags can help solve some of these problems.
Here’s a get-started article on QBO Tags.
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