Dependent Tags CSV Best Practices ( That I had to figure out on my own)

James_Austin

We as a company have 9 custom segments that we use to catalog our data, and employees are required to tag their expenses with all 9 segments so naturally there are a ton of errors. So when I learned about dependent tags I made it a priority to build the CSV and make it happen. I compiled all of the possibilities that employees would/could be able to choose from and I followed the guide that Expensify gives on "best practices for dependent tag CSV."

I could not get the tags to upload correctly, not even close. I searched everywhere and followed all of the instructions I could find but could not get it to work. Until I just problem solved it to success on my own.

Here's some tips that weren't available to me:

1. Make sure all of your tags are uniformly capitalized and spaced and named. If you have a tag in one line reading "tag" and in another line and it reads "Tag" the upload will classify those as 2 different tags and it's hard to figure out what is going wrong.
2. Dependent tags will allow 5 layers of dependent tags. It will allow for one more tag group for a total of 6 but the last one will be independent. Any tags after that will not show up.
3. If you want the tags to work, AT ALL, you have to put blank rows in between the sections you want to divide. Ours is Region then Department so I had to put a blank row between every different department for it to work right. The 6th column of tags does not need to be spaced with it because it isn't attached to the tags before it like the first 5 tags.
4. Here's a snip from my upload, because the sample one that you can download in the best practices guide doesn't really explain much.

If this helps anyone please feel free to reach out and let me know that it did!🤑