Your tags just got a whole lot smarter
October 7th, 2007 by ShashankLast Friday, we released a major upgrade to the way tags work on Buxfer. The overall goal was to make them a lot more powerful yet easier to use.
- Tags can be organized into folders, i.e., you can have one tag be a sub-tag of another tag. E.g., lunch might be a sub-tag contained within food. Organizing tags into folders lets you concisely and descriptively summarize your expenses in a way that you can easily understand. The ‘Expense Analysis’ tool takes into account the sub-tag relationships you specify, and lets you drill down into your expenses starting from broad top-level folders, to narrower tags.
- Automatic tagging has been greatly simplified. Instead of maintaining a separate list of auto-tags, you can simply attach a list of keywords to a tag which determine which transactions the tag will be automatically applied to.
- The entire process of applying tagging rules has been streamlined. First, when you add new transactions, applicable tagging rules are presented as recommendations, which you can customize right at the time of adding those transactions. Second, when you edit tags of already existing transactions, a small popup lets you convert the one-time tags into automatic tagging rules.
We tried our best to provide a smooth transition for existing users to the new system. If you encountered any problems due to the upgrade, do let us know!
October 13th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
I have noticed that my auto-tags (the ones that Buxfer generated by itself, and were super useful for trending/budgeting) have disappeared… and now all transactions are ‘uncategorized’.
Will these return?
October 13th, 2007 at 8:16 pm
Brandon, we did provide a way for you to get those “disappeared” auto-tags. Right after you logged in, you must have seen a way to “Import tags”. If you click on that, you can see all the Buxfer generated auto-tags, and selectively choose ones that you find useful. If you dismissed that screen, shoot us an email and we can give you detailed instructions on how you can import those tags.
October 21st, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Hi
Auto Tags not working for in my account for group entries which my friends did, which contains tags like food,movie,water etc
November 17th, 2007 at 11:24 am
Hey Prashant,
Sorry, I totally forgot to follow up. This problem has been fixed, so things should work fine now.
November 17th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Thanks…
April 6th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
I’m having a fundamental problem with the tagging system: if an item has multiple tags, I can’t figure out how to specify which tag(s) to process in the analysis charts. Is there something I’ve missing?
I have auto-applied the tag “Check” to all transactions containing the work “check”, and “Rent” to all transactions containing the word “rent.” Fair enough. It works great, if I try to view a list of my Checks, or a list of my Rent transactions.
However, If I try to view a pie-chart analysis of my Utilities, my Rent transactions don’t show up - after some investigating, I realized that that is because the tag order of my rent checks is listed as “Check, Rent” and the Pie Chart Analysis only pays attention to the first tag in the list.
I tried simply changing the “tags” field manually to read “Rent, Check” - but the change didn’t take, and I can’t figure out what system Buxfer uses to determine tag order.
I understand that because a pie chart by definition deals with total percentages, it can only apply one tag to a transaction (else percentages would equal more than 100)…
… But it’s a huge problem if I don’t have the ability to define WHICH tag should be used by the Analysis tool! My rent is a significant portion of my Utility bill each month, and right now it’s not appearing in my analysis.
Any suggestions or hints about how I can work around this?
Thanks,
Jason
April 20th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
I have this same problem, any help on this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
August 14th, 2008 at 12:24 am
Jason brought up a very valid point about multiple tags on an item
September 4th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
I have exactly the same problem as Jason Robinson and was hoping to get an answer here. Can anyone from the Buxfer blog team please provide an answer. I have also sent an email to the support team. Thanks in advance.
October 7th, 2008 at 4:49 am
Yes, I have the same problem Jason. However it’s sad that I can’t see any reactions from Buxfer development team here.
October 7th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Jason, Petr,
If you click on ‘More options’ under reports, you will be able to exclude certain tags from the pie chart. In Jason’s case, he could enter ‘check’ as a tag he doesn’t want to see in the pie chart. Then those transactions would show up as ‘Rent’. The ordering of tags doesn’t matter.
Hope that helps!
January 23rd, 2009 at 8:15 am
We are working on restoring that feature, sorry for the inconvenience caused. Meanwhile, you can create tagging rules to tag multiple transactions at once. Just edit the tags for one transaction, and select to make it an automatic rule.