Last 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!