 QuickBooks Online 2023, tags. Get ready to earn the skills needed to boost your bank books on up with QuickBooks Online 2023. Support Accounting Instruction by clicking the link below, giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website, broken out by category, further broken out by course. Each course then organized in a logical, reasonable fashion, making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources, such as Excel practice problems, PDF files, and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again, click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. Here we are in our QuickBooks Online test company file using the accountant view as opposed to the business view. You can toggle between the two views by going to the cog up top, switch the view down below. Duplicating some tabs to put reports in like we do every time, right-clicking the tab up top to duplicate, right-clicking the tab up top to duplicate, going back to the middle duplicated tab down to the reports on the left-hand side. We want the balance sheet report. Tab into the right then, reports on the left, this time the P and the L, the profit and loss, the income statement. Closing up the hand boogie, running it for the month of February, because I think we have some space there. 020123 to 022823, let's run it. Nothing's there, that's what we want because we want a clean report to put some tags in. Closing up the hand boogie on the middle tab, running it for February again, 020123 to 022823, run it. Nothing's there, good, first tab. We're now looking at the tags. We wanted to get into the tags, noting that in some prior presentations, we've been focusing in on some of the tools that basically give another dimension to the normal double entry accounting system, primarily when focused on the income statement, breaking it out by column. Those include first, when we think about them in chronological order, we thought about the jobs, which QuickBooks Online thinks of as the sub-customers. We went to the class tracking then, and then we went to the projects, and then we went to the location tracking, and now we're looking at the tags, which I believe is the last thing that happened in chronological order. But if you group these things together in terms of like functionality, you might have two main categories, one being the jobs or the sub-customers, which are the same kind of different names for the same thing, and the projects, which need to be tied to a customer. That means that the income statement will primarily be broken out, not by jobs or sub-customer or projects, but by customers, which will then show you the columns of the projects or the sub-customers. And then you've got classes, location tracking, and now tags, which kind of fall into their own category, which will have their own kind of dropdown in essence of location classes and tags. Now, the tags of those three are a little bit different from the reporting standpoint side of things. So just a quick recap on the differences with the tags versus the classes and the location tracking. When you look at classes and location tracking, usually what you want to see is an income statement that's gonna give you a breakout by column and then add up to the total. So let me show you an example here. If I total this out to 12, 31, 2, 3, and I break this out, say by class, for example, and run this out, now I've got my classes and notice that I have some stuff that's not specified. Normally when I'm using class or location tracking, I want to have every transaction is gonna be categorized as some kind of class or location. So if I have two locations like California and Nevada, for example, I want all my transactions to be classified as either California and Nevada and my total to not have anything in this non-classified area. If I'm breaking out by business versus personal for my business use and my personal use of QuickBooks file or something like that, then I would want all my transactions to be broken out between business and personal, nothing that's not being categorized as a class. When we think about the tags, then we might use the tags for a few different reasons. One, you might use them in a similar fashion as you use classes or location tracking if you don't have access to classes or location tracking because you're using a version of QuickBooks prior to or cheaper than the ProPlus or above, in which case you don't have access to classes or location tracking. So you might use class tracking in a similar fashion or two, you've already used classes and location tracking and you don't want to add another column up top in classes and location tracking, but rather you want to be able to run another report on a profit loss in essence for another item, another thing. And so you're gonna use tags possibly in that situation or you have a situation where you have access to class tracking and location tracking, but you have some things that you would like to tag where you're not gonna try to tag, like you don't need to have a tag for every transaction, but you have certain things that you want to be tagging. So for example, if I had a certain advertising campaign and I wanted to try to tag the revenue that is linked to that advertising campaign and the costs related to that advertising campaign, in that case, I'm not trying to tie out every transaction to some advertising campaign because it would be impossible to do that possibly, but in the event that I can tag the revenue and the expenses that tie out to a particular advertising campaign, I can tag those items and possibly run an income statement that's just for those tagged items. So that's why you might use the tags to kind of put in an income statement to kind of pick up some items, but not have a situation like you would for locations where you would want to make sure that every transaction is applied to one location or the other. So that's the general idea. You do have access to tags, I believe even if you have a payment scale below the QuickBooks Pro Plus. So let's take a look at where the tags are located here. So if I go up top and we see the tags are in the lists, you'll typically see the tags down here. You can go to the all lists up top and this is another way that you can get into your tags. So I can go to my tags this way and you get your summary. Another way you can get to the tags is go to the banking field on the left-hand side and then the tags. Now also note that when you're adding tags to a transaction, if I was to go to a new button up top and say I wanted an invoice, for example, just to see where the tags are located, there's usually this tags fields right here. Now that tags field, even if you're not using tags, doesn't really get in the way much to me, but if you don't want that tags field here because you're not using it at all and you wanna make your invoice as clean as possible, you can turn the tags off so you don't see that field and you could do that by going to the cog up top, you go into the account and settings on the left and then the sales on the left-hand side and then within the sales, we've got the sales form content and then you've got your tags down here so you could toggle the tags off if you're not using the tags. But I'm gonna close this back out. We're gonna keep the tags on for us here. We're in the tags field. So when you're creating the tags, usually the tags are kind of set up so that you have groups of tags. So we have a common example down here that we set up in some prior presentations where basically we added a tag group, which we said sales rep for California and then we added another tags group and then we can add basically the sales rep and the sales rep is kind of a common usage scenario to be using the tags with. So you can add a tag for the sales item and then we got our sorting capacity then that we have for the sales group and then the individuals within the group. So let's set up a scenario as though since we saw this in a prior presentation as though we're gonna use the tags in a similar way that we would use the classes for a business versus the personal use of a QuickBooks file if we don't have access to the classes and we're trying to break out an income statement for the business use possibly to create like a schedule C for a small sole proprietor type of business. So I would like to set up a system where I'm gonna have a tag for everything either business or personal so I can check the stuff that is untagged and make sure I didn't kind of miss anything that might be able to be an expense or something that possibly could be deducted for taxes. So I'm gonna go up top and say let's say new and let's make a group and I'm just gonna say this is gonna be business and personal in the tag group and let's just put it another color let's make this red and then I'm gonna save it and then within that group let's add some tags and I'm just gonna say one is gonna be B for business and then I'll add the tag and then P for personal adding the tag they're both red because they're gonna be applied to that group so I'll say okay so now we've got within here the business and personal B for business P for personal I'm gonna try to have every transaction that I make either have business or personal tagged on it now so let's say we record some income and expenses so if I go back on over here and make an invoice for example and let's just make a new customer new customer, customer, customer number 10 generic customer number 10. All right so we're gonna tap through this I'm gonna say this is in February 020123 and I'm not worried about the location so I'm gonna make sure to assign a tag to everything and if it's gonna be revenue it's gonna be business if I'm invoicing typically because the only personal revenue I might have would be for my like W2 revenue or something like that which I would put on the personal side so I'm gonna say that the product let's say that we just have hours here and we're gonna say that it was $1,000 the good old thousand dollars and then you could have multiple line items here notice that I can't assign a tag to multiple different line items which is similar kind of to the location tracking and does add kind of a complication to like our model here because I might have some expenses for example that I might need to be allocating out between multiple line items however oftentimes when you're doing this kind of scenario breaking out business versus personal the stuff that you need to allocate between business and personal is stuff that's gonna be more complicated for taxes anyways like your utility bill you might have a home office and you would like to break it out between business and personal well for taxes you're still gonna have to do a separate schedule typically to kind of break that out so it might not be a big issue but remember the tags are similar to the location tracking in that we're not assigning it line item by line item but we're assigning by transaction so we can do an hours and I could say let's just keep it with ours a thousand dollars we'll save it and if I go to my balance sheet so now we've got the accounts receivable reflected here now notice I don't on the drop down when I break this out on the drop down I don't always have the tags on the drop down you would think it would be similar to classes location tracking classes location but you don't often have the tags capacity but if you run the reports from the tags area then sometimes the reports look a little bit different so it's a little bit weird with the tags if I run the reports on the income statement and I hit the drop down here I've got the location I've got the classes and then I've got these two which I believe are tags that I made in prior presentations I'm gonna refresh the screen and now I do see the tags down here for the business and personal on the tags so I can run that if for whatever reason you don't see the tags showing up over here then you might just run the reports from the tags area this is something that's been a little they've kind of I think they're improving it as they run the reports if you run the report from the tags area over here and then run the reports you get a similar profit and loss by tag which should match out you can see it's basically the same report now as the income statement now this should tie out to our total for the profit and loss because we put a tag we're gonna try to put a tag basically to everything so that it's gonna tie out to our total profit and loss so if I go back on over here we've got our profit and loss by tag and that looks good so let's go back on over and add another one and let's say we put some expenses in place here and we'll hit the plus button and let's say we have some expenses so expenses and let's say this is gonna be let's do another vendor vendor three vendor three and okay so we're gonna pay someone in February and then again the tags are up top so I can't really assign it to a line item by line item but I'm gonna buy something that's purely for business and so let's say that we're gonna say this is gonna be supplies, business supplies for $600 and it's gonna be going to that tag this is gonna decrease the checking account and the other side is gonna be an expense and it's gonna be applied to the tag of business so I'll say let's save and new if I check that out on the balance sheet there it is on the balance sheet and notice on the balance sheet they just don't give me the tag option at all over here but on the income statement we have that tag option so we'll just say it's still business I don't have any personal stuff at the moment so I'm gonna go back on over and then let's do a personal one so I'm gonna say expenses to vendor three this time I'm gonna delete the business and do the personal it's in the same group but now it's just the personal item all right that's all I want get out of there and then this is gonna go to utilities let's do utilities this time utilities, boom and this is gonna be for 300 and so this is gonna decrease the checking account the other side going to utilities and to the column of personal for the tags and let's save and close it this time profit and loss running by that tag group and notice what it does here it put it into the business tag supplies, oh yeah there it is, utilities so it breaks it out notice what it doesn't do for you it doesn't give you that total the total column over here which is kind of what we like to see in when I do a profit and loss by class or by location I'd like to see every item broken out business or personal and then the total but we can double check it fairly easily by saying okay let me just look at the totals and see if that ties out to my income statement by total here and I can also look at the unclassified the ones that don't have a tag and see if I have anything in there so for example if I don't assign something a tag let's try that out I'm gonna say plus button and let's say we make an expense and it's gonna go to vendor number three and this time I forgot to add a tag and I wanna add a tag to each transaction how could I figure that out? So I'm gonna say let's say this went to this went to what I wanted to go to miscellaneous miscellaneous and I'll make it an expense account and other business expense boom and this is gonna be for $170 let's say save and close that and if I go to my profit and loss and run the profit and loss it's still it's not showing up even in that ungrouped area so notice in order to see the fact that I didn't categorize something I could say okay let me look at my business and personal and I have supplies and utilities but and I could like total this up and see my total and compare that to my profit and loss that's just my totals right here and I would see a difference of the miscellaneous $170 so notice that that's a little bit more tedious of a system than if I could just use the classes because what I would like to see is business, personal and then it total up over here and if there's anything that wasn't assigned a class I would like it to then show me the unassigned items but when I'm using tags I can't do that I think when we go down here and we look at these ungrouped tags these are the ones that assigned a tag that aren't included in a group right but tags are a little bit different oftentimes when you're using them because you could apply two tags like it's possible for me to go over here and add a transaction where I apply two two tags to the one transaction I could do business and something else within the tag so notice it won't let me do business and personal in the same group which is kind of nice because then that means that it won't allow you to double count within that group so that's kind of nice but you could still kind of use it in the same way as you would with the classes to kind of try to break out business and personal but you have to do a little bit more work to double check that you've assigned everything to a tag and you could do that by again go into the tag here we could say business and personal and then I could export this to Excel and just add up the two columns to give me my total column over on the right hand side and then compare that compare my net income, my total net income to what is on an income statement that's just my total income statement and then try to drill down and determine which transactions I didn't add a tag to and then drill down and basically add the transactions that have not been tagged okay so now the other interesting thing with the tags is that sometimes your filtering options are a little bit different as well so you can see over here they put they put the tags on the income statement which is great because I can see the tags over here but you would think that if I go into the custom the customized area and the filters down here that I would then be able to see the tags to filter by because I could filter by location I can filter by class why can't I filter by the tags you would think that that would be here but no but if you generate the report from the tags reports so if I go over here and close this back out do you wanna leave without saving I'm gonna say yes and I generate my report here so here's my transactions that are with the tags if I run the report this way I basically come to the same profit and loss report you can see it is in essence the same because if I hit the drop down it's got the same kind of options over here for the most part and then if I go to my customize up top and my filters then I've got my tags shows up in the filtering option so that's a little wonky I don't know exactly why that is when you run a normal because again if I run my profit and loss over here you know I get to and I filter this by I filter this by my tags run it I get basically the same report it's basically the same thing here and then I customize it and look at my filter and options I don't get my tag filters so that's a little bit of a wonky thing I don't know you know but it's not really an issue it could be frustrating but once you see that you can run this report over here and then you can go in and customize and further filter by the tags so that I can go into my tags and further filter on the business or personal so I could say business and filter down and then it filters down that way now if you're using the tags in conjunction with other things so for example if you were if these transactions you're using tags in conjunction with the classes and the location tracking you can go into a report like this in the tags and further filter down by the classes so for example if I go into the customize up top and go into my filtering down here I can further filter by classes so if I assigned a class or a location possibly I would assign a location to California or Nevada or something like that and I wanted to look at maybe I'm using my tags for sales reps then I can filter down my tags to California or Nevada but the other common thing that you would think that you would want to do is to run the profit and loss by say class if you're using classes and then filter by the tags and note that normally you would think to do that by running a normal profit and loss over here I've changed the dates so that I can see some of the classes that we've done in the past and then I've sorted this by classes instead of tags and then you would think you might want to filter by the tags so I've got it by class and then you could customize up top but there's no tags field here however if I go to this report over here where I generated the report let's go back I generated from our tags group any of the tags groups right I just generated a report from the tags group and now it's sorted by the group of tags and if I hit the dropdown and display by column but now I change it to the classes then I'm basically in the same situation as I was before let's change the range go up to 12, 3, 1, 2, 3 so we've got the same net income now sorted by classes instead of tags but instead of it being a profit and loss report now it's a profit and loss by tag group even though it's not by tag group anymore because I made it by classes but if I go into the customize up top and I look at my filtering options now the classes are there and I can further filter down or the tags are there so I can further filter down by tags and I could choose like business now we didn't assign a class to it but you could see how that's a little bit different so you can use the filtering options but you gotta be a little bit careful of how the filters work because if you generate the reports from the tag group reports you come up with similar kind of functionality of the profit and loss and you can run a profit and loss by class but then you might have more filtering options to be able to filter by the tags okay I'm gonna run that report again just to take a look at the example that we did remember our example is that we're using a cheaper version so we don't have access to the classes and we wanna use tags to break out between business and personal so for example here if I run this report and let's change the date range to the end of February 02, 28, 23 you'll notice our issue was that I had business and personal I would like to have that non-classified column over here to see if there's anything that I didn't put a tag on to double check that I've tagged everything and therefore that all of my income statement especially for the business is correct so I possibly can use that for taxes for example so notice what we could do then is if I generate the report this way I could then say let's run the report by total now and then I'm gonna run the report and then I'm gonna filter it by the things that are not specified because now I have my custom field up the top and I can filter it by tags now and I wanna filter it by the things that I didn't assign a tag to you the ones that are not specified so not specified I could run that and there's that miscellaneous item so this is similar to if I ran the income statement with a classes to the non-specified column that I can now drill down on and say I didn't assign a class to that one so I'm gonna go into that one and see if I can drill down on it and say well that one should have been business so then I could say that one needs to have a tag up here for business boom save and close it and so now everything has been specified between business and personal so you can use it in a similar fashion that way which is kind of neat so now I've got it broken out everything business versus personal and I've got a little income statement for my business side of things and then the personal is broken out to the side if I added those two up I would have my total for income and personal which I can see by just looking at my total up top just looking at the total this way and if I wanted to see if anything was not specified if my net income here doesn't tie out to the net income of adding these two up for the business and personal this way and it doesn't because my date range is let's change the date range well let's keep the date range I could say it doesn't tie out well then I can go to this one and I can say let's customize and filter by tags and look at all the transactions that were not specified and then I'd have to go in here to each of these transactions and specify them assign them to business or personal so it actually works fairly well to break it out but the other reason you might want to use tags is for those kind of things where you're not trying to have the full group tie out so for example if I go back on over and I was looking at if you're looking at something like advertising campaigns and you're trying to tie out the cost of the advertising campaign to the revenue that it's gonna be leads that it's gonna be generating then you're not gonna have a situation where every advertising campaign is gonna be tied out to your total sales line because you're just gonna have tags that are signed where they're applicable they might not be assigned to every sales item so that's another place where the tags can be used so just as a bottom line the tags are similar to the classes and the location tracking however, if you're in a situation where you want a profit and loss that's gonna have every transaction assigned a class or location those are usually better tools cause they give you that non specified area and the total on the right hand side although you can see that there is a work around to do a similar kind of thing with the tags if you need it to which you might if you don't have access to the classes or the location tracking cause you're in a tear down on the level of the payment level and you can use the tags in a similar fashion which is pretty cool and then again you can use the tags if you've already used up the classes and location tracking and if you're trying to assign tags to certain things where you don't want all the tag group to tie out to the total but you're just tagging certain things so that you can write an income statement and remember there's a difference in functionality at least at this point in time if you run the report from the tags you might have more filtering options than if you run just a normal profit and loss report also the tags are pretty much limited to the profit and loss report whereas the groups and the classes and locations have some balance sheet functionality although all of them are more focused kind of on the performance or income statement reports