What are tags?
Tags (sometimes called dimensions) are short labels you can attach to any document — receipts, invoices, expenses, or income — to organize and analyze them by criteria that go beyond category, vendor, or date.
A few common ways teams use tags:
- Project (e.g. Website Redesign, Client Acme)
- Department (e.g. Sales, Marketing, HR)
- Cost center (e.g. R&D, Operations)
- Region (e.g. North America, Europe)
- Customer or vendor to track income or costs by entity
- Product line (e.g. Electronics, Software)
A single document can carry multiple tags at the same time, so you can mix dimensions — for example tagging an invoice with both a project tag and a region tag.
Creating and managing tags
Open Document tags from your account settings to manage every tag in your account. From this view you can rename or delete existing tags, and you'll see how many documents are using each one.
A few rules to keep in mind:
- Tag names are limited to 40 characters.
- Tag names must be unique within the account.
- Renaming a tag updates it everywhere it's used; deleting one removes it from all documents that carried it.
Assigning tags to a document
Tags are added directly on each document. Open any document, find the Tags field, and start typing — existing tags appear as suggestions, and pressing Enter on a brand-new name creates the tag on the fly. There's no fixed limit on how many tags one document can have.
Adding tags to many documents at once
In the web app's Documents list, tick the documents you want, open Actions and choose Assign tags. Add to existing keeps the tags the documents already have, and Replace all swaps them for the ones you pick. In the mobile app, tap Select on the Documents tab, pick the documents and tap Tags. See How do I change the Category or other details of many documents at once?.
Grouping documents like folders, for example by merchant
SparkReceipt has no folders or sub-folders. Tags and saved searches do the same job:
- A tag per group. Tag the documents of one client, project or merchant, then filter by that tag.
- A saved search per merchant. In the web app, add the Merchant / Payer filter, save the search and click Add to sidebar in its editor. It then sits under Favourites in the sidebar, one click away, and new documents from that merchant show up in it automatically. See How to search, filter and sort documents.
Tags or Categories?
Categories are your chart of accounts: each line item of a document is booked to one Category, and that is what your accounting software and tax reports use. Tags are free labels on top, and a document can carry many. If you created Categories that should have been tags, see Turn Categories into Tags.
Filtering and reporting by tags
You can filter by one or more tags in Documents, on the web and in the mobile app, and when you create a report from Reports. In Documents, picking several tags shows every document that carries at least one of them.
When you create a report, you can also narrow it to documents that carry every selected tag. On the web, a Match choice appears once you pick a second tag, with Any selected tag and All selected tags. In the mobile app the same choice is called Hash tag matching. Use it to report on one project, one department, or any other slice that maps to your tagging scheme.
Automating tag assignment
Tags can also be applied automatically through automation rules. For example, you can set up a rule that tags every receipt from a specific vendor with a particular project tag, so new documents land already organized.