Guide to Organized Tagging

 

Having recently redone all of my tagging, I feel that giving some advice on how to tag would be helpful for new users.  Here's a few things to keep in mind.

 

Think BIG

The most important thing to remember when tagging is to think big when choosing what tags are appropriate for your transactions.  The reason for this is primarily for pie charts, as they will allow you to drill top down through your transactions to get a more and more specific view of how you're spending your money.  Because of this, starting with the biggest broadest tag you can think of is important to keep this organized.

 

In order to do this easily, think of your tags as being from different buckets that have varying levels of specificity.

 

Example:  I have purchased Mario Kart from Amazon.com

 

Tagging can be viewed as something similar to MadLibs with the following sentence:  "_________ has spent ________ on ______________."

 

Bucket 1:

Josiah

Kemi

Pet

 

These stand for myself, my wife, and my pets respectively.  These are the highest level tags I have, and it is a rule that every last transaction that comes through Wesabe be tagged with 1 and only 1 of of these tags.  This forces my pie charts to be organized.  Every other tag will be part of the drilldown following the first chart, which will have only those 3 slices.  In addition to these 3 basic tags, for joint expenses that my wife and I both lay claim to (House, Groceries, etc.) I have added a 4th tag: KemiAndMe as putting 2 tags from Bucket 1 which would violate the requirement that I must have 1 and only 1 tag from Bucket 1 and would skew the pie chart.

 

Bucket 2:

Food

Entertainment

Transportation

Fee

...etc.

 

Here we get more granular.  So far, the sentence might read: "Josiah has spent $45.99 on Entertainment." Once again, from this bucket you may take 1 and only 1 tag.  Though at this point you are not required to give a tag, a sentence that merely says "Josiah has spent$45.99" is not very helpful (just as omitting the first tag is even less useful: "$45.99 has been spent.")

 

At this point, we've completed our Madlib from above: "Josiah has spent $45.99 on Entertainment."

 

You could stop here, but most people want more detail about their transactions.  For Bucket 3, instead of adding to the sentence, you will be replacing the final tag Entertainment with something more specific:

 

Bucket 3:

VideoGame

Movie

Show

BoardGame

Music

...etc.

 

Now my tag list looks like this:  Josiah Entertainment VideoGame

My sentence says: "Josiah has spent $45.99 on [a] VideoGame".

 

This process repeats until your OCD is satisfied by your specificity, adding tags from new buckets. I personally rarely go beyond 4 or 5 tags, but I never go below 3 unless there is a special case.

 

Bucket 4:

Wii

xbox360

PS3

PC

 

Here, we'd replace VideoGame with Wii, and so on, making the sentence read "Josiah has spent $45.99 on [the] Wii." and the tag list looks like this: "Josiah Entertainment VideoGame Wii".

 

Obviously there is a lot of personal interpretation to be done here.  If you are the only person spending money from your accounts, omit the first bucket.  The rest of the buckets work just fine, as you are essentially implying that I is the first tag from bucket 1.

Gotchas:

 

Here's a few things to watch out for:

 

• If a tag in a bucket lower on the list occurs with more value than it's parent, it will automatically shift up a bucket, messing up your tagging.  Example: I used to use the tag Paycheck on all of my wife's and my paychecks, making Paycheck worth more than either my wife's or my tags.  This caused the earnings pie chart to be: 70% Paycheck, 20% Josiah, 10% Kemi, and it forced Paycheck into Bucket 1, making Josiah and Kemi have an odd split between Bucket 1 and 2, depending on which part of the chart you were looking at, which is a problem for the pie chart's usefulness.   While I could drill down through Paycheck to get to see what percentage my wife and I had contributed, it was much more useful when, instead of putting Paycheck, I put the name of the company that paid the money.  This caused the tags Josiah (me) and Kemi (my wife) to be worth more than it's children, and it fixed the pie chart.
• [Feel free to contribute your own gotchas that you have encountered]