Tags

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Overview

Tags allow your users to filter their accounting reports by customizable groups, offering a more detailed and granular view of their business. Whether tracking profitability by job, assessing performance by location, or managing fund tracking, Tags provide a flexible solution for various segment tracking use cases.

You can create Platform-level Tag Groups, such as “customer”, and allow Instances to manage their own values, such as the names of their various customers. Once set up, users can assign these tags to their transactions, similar to assigning categories. Users can then filter their accounting reports by specific tags.

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Use cases

Tags are highly customizable and built to be tailored to the important use case(s) of your users. Visit your demo to see Tags in action. If you don’t have access to a demo instance, please contact us.

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Disambiguation

Though semantically similar, Tags are not to be confused with categories. A category is an accounting ledger assigned to a line entry (and, by extension, a transaction), while a Tag is a piece of optional metadata that provides enhanced filtering and search capabilities and helps provide financial insights.

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Prerequisites

Tags are only available for Instances using PlatformGL.

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Steps

This guide walks you through the necessary steps to set up Tags for your Platform, creating tags for Instances to use, applying Tags to resources, and filtering reports with Tags.

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1. Define Tag Groups

Control the organization of tags at the Platform level through Tag Groups, a set of pre-defined buckets that have many Tags.

Create Tag Groups using the Create Tag Group endpoint. Because all Instances share Tag Groups, we encourage you to use only a few generalized groups to describe how businesses want to filter their data.

For example, a chain of hardware stores might want to filter their data by location or a contractor might want to filter based on a specific job. Job and location are both good Tag Groups because these both help business get deeper insights into their financial reports.

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2. Create Tags for Instances

With the Tag Groups created, an Instance needs Tags to assign to resources. You can either pre-define an Instance’s Tags or allow them to create their own. In either case, use the Add Instance Tag endpoint and pass along the name and tag_group_id.

If you allow Instances to create their own tags, we recommend placing this flow on a settings page or as a part of their account setup.

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3. Apply Tags

When a user applies Tags to a Transaction, under the hood, they apply Tags to the line entries associated with the transaction. To make referencing tags easier, there are three ways to list and apply tags: via transactions, journal entries, or line entries.

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Tag Transactions

You can assign Tags via the Create Transactions and the Update Transaction endpoints by passing ids of each Tag into tag_ids. Using either of these methods will apply the Tags to all Line Entries connected to the Transaction.

Use the Get Transactions endpoint to list all Tags on all Line Entries associated with that Transaction.

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Tag Journal Entries

Both the Create Journal Entry and Update Journal Entry endpoints by passing ids of each Tag into tag_ids. Using either of these methods will apply the Tags to all Line Entries in the Journal Entry.

Use the Get Journal Entry endpoint to list all tags on all Line Entries contained within that Journal Entry.

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Tag Line Entries

Use the Update Line Entry endpoint by passing ids of each Tag into tag_ids to update the Tags on a specific Line Entry.

Listing Tags using the Get Ledger Line Entry endpoint will list only the tags applied to that specific line entry.

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4. Filter reports with tags

After Tags are applied, they can be used to filter reports. Currently, the following reports support filtering using Tags:

• Income Statement
• Balance Sheet
• Ledger Statement
• Cash Flow Report
• Cash Flow Totals
• Top Expenses
• Net Profit by Period
• Gross Profit by Period
• Financial Summaries by Period

Each of these reports accepts a parameter tag_ids, which correspond to the selected tags. Selecting one or more tag_ids will filter the report using only Line Entries that have all given Tags.

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Resources

• Create Tag Group endpoint
• Add Instance Tag endpoint
• Create Transactions and Update Transactions endpoints
• Create Journal Entry and Update Journal Entry endpoints
• Update Line Entry endpoint