How to do reporting based on tags with multiple tags

Question

I am trying to create a report that shows all expenses for each of our children during a given time period. I have a main category for Kids with a number of sub-categories (allowance, after school activities, clothing, holidays, etc). For each transaction I use tags to identify which child (Kid 1 Name, Kid 2 Name, etc). I also use tags to identify any transactions that we have set to some kind of regular auto-payment so I can quickly see what we have automatically debited from our accounts each month. And I do tags to specify any specific holiday purchases are made for.

The report I'm trying to use is the Cash Flow by Tag report. I specify I only want to see the Kids category and I specify I only want ones tagged with one of the kids. I get a report that almost works - with all the expenses shown in columns under each childs name. However, where there are transactions that have multiple tags (ie: Kid 1:monthly autopay) - it treats that as a separate tag altogether and puts it in it's own column. Same if I tag something in the Holiday sub-category with Christmas. So instead of having one column of "Kid 1". I have a column of "Kid 1" with all expenses for that child with no other tags, another column of "Kid 1:monthly autopay" for all the expenses that have both, and one column of "Kid 1:Christmas" for those expenses with both. I'd just like to see one column with "Kid 1" and ignore those other tags.

Is that a glitch or how it is supposed to work? If it's how it's supposed to work, I don't see what the point of ever creating multiple tags is since they are basically treated as a new unique tag when they are grouped together?

Any help is much appreciated!

dsmb2025 · Answer

Thanks for the responses. I tried the ~ trick. It does get rid of the unwanted columns with multiple tags, but those transactions don't show up under just the Kids name. For example, Kid 1 has a weekly after school activity. I have that categorized as Kids > After School Activities and tagged as Kid1:monthly autopay. I want it to show up as an After School Activity under the Kid 1 column in my report. For this report it doesn't matter if it's on autopay or not. But it looks like my options are either have it show up under the separate column Kid1:autopay or not show up at all.

I don't see them as sub-tags since they have no relation to each other. If that is really how they are processed, what is the point of having multiple tags at all? Wouldn't it be the same as creating a separate tag "Kid 1's monthly autopay"? That doesn't seem helpful at all. I thought about having each Kid as their own category, but then I'm duplicating all the sub-categories for each kid which seems like overkill. But it looks like that's the route I have to take unless I'm mistaken.

BK · Answer

You can use the Tilde character to exclude a specific tag.  In your multi-tag example of "Kid 1:monthly autopay", you can insert "~monthly" in the tag field of your custom report setup and that will omit the "monthly autopay" column in the report.  See this post for an example: https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20247417/#Comment_20247417

Credit goes to our superuser @Rocket J Squirrel whom I learned this from.

Also refer to this post for the document on additional matching characters.

Jim_Harman · Answer

I think that report works that way because it must only include each transaction once and it does not have the concept of "sub-tags". If a transaction has two Tags, it can't just pick one and assign the transaction to that, and if it assigned the transaction to both tags, the report totals would be wrong.

What has worked for me has been to have Kid1 and Kid2 as Subcategories under Kids or as top level Categories, with subcategories under them for the types of expenses. Then you would use the Tags to identify non-overlapping special characteristics of the expenses - Auto-pay, Christmas, etc.