I need independent and dependent tags

rgondo

I have 4-5 required tag levels and then one optional level. Is there a way to implement this without adding in all the permutations into the dependent template?

tylerzoll

@rgondo, Do you have tags that are not related? This isn't a best practice, but I've consolodated my tags so that there is one tag for multiple segments. For example I have a tag for district and a tag for event. I realised that someone never needs to tag an expense for both district and event, so I combined them into on segment and just called it class. Now instead of having two manditory tags, I have something that looks like this:

District 1
District 2
District 3
Event XYC
Event XYB
Event XYA

Another tip is to default tags by setting up rules wherever possible. If you can set up rules and default expenses wherever possible, that also helps with user adoption and efficiency in the porcess.

rgondo

Thanks @tylerzoll . That's a good idea but I don't think it quite solves my use case.

Basically we want to capture all the necessary info for documenting our expenses, but then certain ad hoc events come up during the year that we want to tag and associate expenses to. So the problem is that we don't want to make tags dependent because that means users are constantly selecting "N/A" or similar on every single expense except for those 4-6 times a year where we might do an event.

Example: Let's say I have a category called "Tradeshows" that I want to capture expenses related to that specific event. So throughout the year there would be "Tradeshow - Chicago, Tradeshow-NY, Tradeshow-Los Angeles" etc. Our tradeshow schedule isn't known in advance so we can't bake all of these into the tag options ahead of time. I know I can always create a new tag level to capture this, but this also results in unnecessary work for all other users, including those that never would attend the tradeshows. So that's why I want to make it optional for others.

At the same time I also understand that I can create multiple policies to account for Sales dept vs Accounting, for example, but we're a small company where everyone helps out in all places so I can't remove options from certain users.

tylerzoll

@rgondo, I feel your pain completely. I end up having users select no class a lot. Your folks don’t happen to use TextExpander do they? They could potentially put something in the comment field if they could consistently type the exact same thing. I know that there is a feature in development that will allow tagging users to expenses. It would be nice if you could use an @tradeshow or something.

The other issue is that I don’t know how well something like that would export into accounting systems.

rgondo

We're not familiar with that but we'll look into it - thanks for sharing, it looks really interesting. We're still in the testing stage so I'll come back to this once there's more feedback on it. Thanks