Look What I Found!
A First Look at Tagging in QBO

Tagging is QuickBooks Online’s latest innovation. It has the potential to transform the way you use your QBO to analyze your company.

Tagging is used in a variety of ways in your other software – in Gmail you tag emails so you can search for them. Quicken uses Tags to categorize transactions. WordPress uses Tags to group your blog posts.

In a way they’re similar to Classes, in that they are used to group your transactions used in reporting. Intuit’s goal may be to replace Classes with Tags, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.

Tags are currently in beta, so you may not see them in your file yet. But I wanted to show you a sneak preview of what’s to come! The feature is just in its infancy, and only has a few abilites to date. That will change as they develop the tool.

Tags is found under the Gear. At the top of the window are the Money In and Money Out charts to compare your Tags’ income and expenses.

At the bottom of the window, create Types to group the Tags according to topic. Add Tags to each Type.

In every form in QBO, you’ll see a box to assign Tags. You can apply one tag from each Type to a transaction, with up to 10 Tags per transaction (that’s the current maximum number of Types). Note, though, that there is also a “No Type” Type where you can also add Tags, so you may be able to get around the limit.

Once you’ve started adding Tags to your transactions, use the Money In and Money Out charts to compare the Tags.

Right now, that’s all the tool does. In the future, we’ll be able to Tag transactions in the Banking Feed, and run a P&L by Tag.

I think this will become a really useful enhancement for business owners to view at-a-glance comparisons. I encourage you to submit your Feedback to Intuit so we can see this tool develop and grow!

Updates:

2/23/2020: Tagging is now available in the Banking Feed!