Formatting Multiple Tags in a Report

Daniel R · March 2023

I track my spending across three accounts (two credit cards, supported by one debit card account). I have multiple buckets that all of the income goes into and the spending comes out of. This way if I do not spend my budgeted amount in one category for a month or I have extra income I can move that money to another bucket within my one debit card account. I use the transaction reports to keep track of how much money is left in each bucket. I have the account split into ten different buckets and I use tags to track what transactions come out of what bucket. The problem is how the transaction report is displayed if I have multiple tags on one transaction. See the attached PDF that highlights the issue. I have the report set to show the spending tag, but any time there are transactions with the spending tag and another tag it adds it as a separate line item on the list. In my mind because my report is set to show the spending tag only the items with the spending tag and another tag should be shown as a sub items of spending on the report, not as separate line items. This way I can quickly look at the spending tag in my report and see how much is left in the spending bucket without having to subtract all of the negative values from the positive ones for myself. Is there a way with this report or another report to make it display the value in the way I described.

MontanaKarl · March 2023

The problem I see is that you want to treat the tags as if they are a hierarchy … in this case with Spending being primary, and any additional tags being secondary (and hence subtotaled withing Spending).

But, there is no hierarchy to tags. They provide different way of grouping transactions beyond Categories. Categories of course are hiearchical and could do this, but without specific categories, you'd have no idea what your spending was on.

In your example, the tag ‘Spending’ has the same meaning as ‘Gift’, and transactions with both tags should be found when searching for either (unless the ‘all’ is part of the report filter) - so the way your report appears is as designed and there really aren't any features in the product to allow it to appear the way you'd like.

I gather that ‘spending’ does not cover all of your expense categories if you generate an income/expense or cash flow report and that's why you're trying to summarize things with tags. I just don't see any way to do what you want without either only using one tag per transaction as part of a combination of using nested categories to track your spending.

Formatting Multiple Tags in a Report

Answers

Categories