hi folks i want to show you what is probably the single most exciting new feature that quickbooks has added to any of their products in the last several years this new feature is called tags now tags is available only in the online version of quickbooks and the good news is it's available in all the quickbooks online versions from simple start to essentials to plus to advance so if you're working with quickbooks desktop tags is not there and it's probably not going to be as it seems to be of more of a quickbooks online type of feature now if you don't see tags already enabled in your quickbooks online and the quickest way to check if your tags are enabled is just click on the new button to create a new transaction and then click on expense and then once you look at the expense screen there should be one big box that says tags right there under the payee name the date all that stuff so if you don't see that in there that means tags is not enabled in your quickbooks online file and you're probably going to have to go back into the home screen and click on the gear menu right here in the top right click on that gear menu and then go to where it says quickbooks labs so once you go inside quickbooks labs that's where you can turn on additional features are sort of in let's call it beta test mode so this feature is kind of a beta test by the time i'm recording this i'm sure that in the near future this will just be in all the quickbooks online files and you don't actually have to go into quickbooks labs to turn it on so right here is called tags and you just have to make sure you toggle that on and then click on done so once you turn on tags then you should be able to see tags in your transactions now i'm going to click on the gear menu again the gear menu on the top right of the screen and then i'm going to go into the second column under the list column and then i'm going to go to the very last option called tags in there i get to go into my sort of tag management screen i can also get the tags by clicking on the banking menu on the left hand side of the screen and then on the drop down menu under banking rules receipts i should see tags right after receipts so there's two ways to get to the same screen now when you first log into the screen you're going to see money in and money out and these are examples so these are basically just illustrations to get you thinking about what tags are you actually have to create your tag groups and you have to create your individual tags inside your tag groups the way i think of tags is is a way to add a dimension of information inside your transactions that you can later on segregate and separate in a report or you can run specific reports like a profit and loss by that specific tag or tag group now a tag group would be a set of tags and the tags would be that individual attribute that you will be adding to those transactions so this gets really complicated to explain but then once you actually see it work it becomes very easy so hang with me so let's say for example i want to attract the sales salesperson to sales that i'm making now quickbooks also have a default place for you to enter salespeople and select the salesperson in each transaction tags would essentially solve this problem so i'm going to click on the new button on the right hand side of the screen a big green new button click on that new and then click on tag group i have to first create the tag group where all the tags are going to be under now for the stack group i'm just going to call it sales person so we're going to track the salespersons on every sale so i'm going to click on the drop down menu for the color and give it a color to make it easier for you to identify right there's about 16 different colors so it should be easier as you're looking with tags you don't have to go read what the tag group is with the color you'll know so let's say our sales people are going to be read so we know that all the tags with reds are sales people so i'm going to go ahead and click on save and that officially creates the tag group or the category let's call it that then let's create the individual tags which in this case would be the individual salespeople so let's say we have john smith and then we'll click on add and then we have mary roberts we'll click on add and then we have juan garcia and then we click on add so we got three sales people john smith mary roberts i wrote reports but let's just edit that i really meant roberts that's what happens when you think about accounting and reports and things like that all day where words just start jumbling together so we got john smith mary roberts juan garcia those are my three tags under the tag group sales person which is read to help us identify so it's kind of the first step we created that tag now let's say for example i want to create tags for expenditures that i make while i'm out of town okay for whatever reason i want to i wanna know the expenditures i make while i'm out of town uh versus the ones that i'm in town now that maybe their travel expenses maybe they're not it really doesn't matter let's say that's something that we want to track so i'm gonna go to a new tag group and we're going to call this uh expense sourced something like that again you you come up with your own wording we're going to use a yellow for this one or orangey yellow whatever that is click on save and then we're going to have three tags i'm going to do in murder in town and then i'm going to do out of town okay and out of town could be let's say within the u.s we can put something like us and then we'll do out of the country right for whatever reason again one of the really cool things and the reason why i made that that that statement of this is the most exciting new feature that quickbooks has done is because there are no guard rails there are no limits they're not the the features aren't meant to you be used in a very specific way it is meant for you to use it however the heck you think you might use it or might be useful for you so it's really exciting uh just the concept of what we're about to see in the next couple months couple years on what people are going to come up with and how they're going to use tags to manage their business better so i'm gonna go ahead and click on done and there we go so we got sales person and expense source let's say for example that i'm also tracking expenses in the business that are uh that are spent by one of the partners and for whatever reason at the end of the of the year you know the partners kind of like take a look at the expenses they made and they make their own arrangements in terms of how to recalculate that so we're going to go ahead and click on new and then and then do a new tag group and i'm gonna put here who spent it okay again i'm putting a question mark i'm doing my own thing make it blue that's okay and then we'll have uh in this case just to simplify we're gonna have partner a and then we're gonna have partner b partner b and then we're gonna have uh employee employee perfect so let's say if i if a regular employee spends the money or uses their credit card or authorizes the expenditure that would be them but if it's partner a or partner b we'll identify that because maybe that has some significance to us at the end of the year so we click on done and there we go very simple we got three tag groups each of the tag group has three individual tags that's really all you'll be doing on this screen during the setup process uh this is going to evolve we're going to go back into the screen and do other things as we tag some of the transactions so i'm just going to go to my profit and loss real quick go a profit and loss here i'm going to run a profit and loss for last month just so we can kind of see what we have now and and what we have here these are transactions that have already been entered into quickbooks and i'm going to go into them and i'm going to add add tags to them so then we can start seeing what that looks like when when we're all done tagging them so i'm going to go into let's say my office supplies click on that number that should take me to a detailed report that shows me all the office supplies and then i can click on any individual expenditure let's go to apple.com here and then i can add the tags that i want so let's say for example this expenditure was made in town uh there's no sales people because it's an expenditure so i don't even even need to track that and the person that spent this was an employee so you're not you're not you know forced to use all tags and also you're limited to one tag per tag group so you can leave a tag group unused and then if you use a tag from any type group all the other options go away i can change it if i want to see i can toggle through it but i can't use more than one tag from the same type group which makes total sense by the way so i like that so we're going to click on save and close and simply that's how you create your tags now let me go ahead and create a tag for a sales transaction so i'm going to go into new and do a new invoice and let me date this let's say last month okay and i'll pick one of the my customers here let's say we got joe the plumber one of our customers i'll pick uh product or service let's say we're gonna do let's see some service here and this is going to be 80 times 75 6 000 and then we'll click on the tags here and we'll assign this sale to john smith okay and i don't need to use the other tags you're not forced to use tags in any situation actually so i click on save here and then i'll do a save and new just so i can create sort of multiple transactions so we can kind of see what that looks like on the report so i'll pick a different customer here i'll pick a different item let's say this is forty five hundred dollars and let's say this is going to be juan garcia and then click on save a new so as you can tell i'm creating multiple invoices uh all pretty much in the same month different customers and uh different products in this case um and uh and i'm using a different uh in this case let's put this 200 a different salesperson per se so we can see our reports uh per salesperson so i'll do save a new i'll do one more just so we can have one more in the can here i'll pick customer b we'll pick an item here let's make this 540 and we'll make this one john miss sale so i click on save and that's it so we've done enough tagging so we can know kind of what's going on so let's go back into the gear menu on the top right and then click on tags on that list column that second column and then kind of see what's going on here notice that now that i'm uh that i'm going into this report there's already some transactions in there you really start seeing kind of what's going on so notice that on the left hand side we got our money in tags uh we can choose what date range let's say i only want to see last month and then we can click here where it says who spent it and we can choose which of the tag groups per se we want to track so i'm going to click on sales person and there we go there i got my sales per salesperson for that last month look how great this is how easy it is to follow we we go we go on the right hand side where it says money out i can also pick my date range let's do it last month and then i can switch across expense source right and uh who spent it right let me tie a couple of more expenditures so this report starts looking a little bit more rich per se much more information so what i'm going to do is i'm going to scroll down here and i'm going to click on any of the tags that are already in place so let's click on here as a sales person and then i'll click on any of these links that say one transaction two transaction whatever it says click on that and that's going to take me to a completely different screen which is like a transactions by tag screen in the transactions by tag screen i can see all the transactions and the tags that it has if i click on the current tags filter and i click on reset filters and click on apply then i'm going to see all the transactions that have tags and don't have tags here in the date range i can go into the filter and let's say i'm going to be again focused on just last month so we'll do here last month and click on apply so there's all my transactions for last month and let's say on the filters i'm gonna go to type and then i'm gonna go to money out so it's focused only on money out transactions so there we go here's all the transactions that i have from last month notice that a whole bunch of them uh don't have tags and just one of them has a tag now what's cool about this screen is i can click on the transaction it will open the transaction itself this is ubereats this is 17 i'll make a decision right let's say this was out of town inside the us and this was spent by partner a and then i click on save and close so i can click on the individual transaction and tag it or i can do some batch tagging from here so let's say that um that if i actually had the vendor name in here so it'll be a lot easier to see unfortunately because i didn't enter the vendor name on it it makes it very difficult to tag so for example in this case i'm going to actually create the vendor and this is one of the reasons why i strongly strongly feel that you should always have a payee or a vendor in a transaction so you can do reclassifications much easier and i got a special video called how to use quickbooks wrongly or the wrong way to use quickbooks where i specifically show how people end up doing this error not putting a payee i'll put a link to the description in the description to that video if you want to check it out anyway if you had visibility to all those vendors you should be able to tag things fairly quickly from here let's just make the assumption that we that we know contextually based on the dollar amount who spent the money and we're gonna click on multiple transactions so let me click back here so we're gonna click on multiple transactions the ones that we know for a fact what the tags should be we'll click on the drop down menu where it says update tags i can click on add tags after you click on add tags you just click on that drop down menu select the tags that you want to tag all those transactions sort of the same way so let's say this is all in town and this is all partner a and then i click on apply and then i go back and select some other transactions again if i had the payee there that would be a lot easier contextually but usually with the date the amount of the pay you will know you select all the transactions that you want to massively tag click on add tag and again we're going to make this partner b and let's make all these out of town and then we'll just kind of play with these and only show heroes as tags i can i can filter out and only show uh specific ones if i only want to show specific ones or in this case it's basically showing all of them right so i'm gonna just just pick a couple more here okay and then click on update tags add tags and then we'll make this in town and we'll make this employee and click on apply and i will do a couple more here let's select these two update tags let's do partner a and let's do in town and click on apply perfect so not all the transactions are tagged of course there's a lot of things are untagged in this case but i gave you an idea more or less how you can sort of massively tag transactions if you uh want to i can go back and click on alt tags it takes me to my main tagging screen notice that we got a lot more information in here we got all the expenses by by uh by who spent it i can click on that drop down menu and click on expense source and then i can see where all the expenses are being made again how you use tags is gonna be very custom very specific to your business as a consultant as a business consultant this is probably the biggest opportunity that myself and my team have to help people choose their tag groups choose their tags and and teach them how to you know kind of build the discipline to tag transactions so they can run reports like this really quickly and be able to make essential business decisions based on that and i'm going to scroll down a little bit and then show you this action button here there's an action button that says run report so if i go to who spent it and i click on run report it will now take me to a screen that can run a report by transaction tag so i'm going to switch this to last month let's go to last month where is last month should be here somewhere of course last month and we will see all the expenses by tag notice that i can minimize or collapse each of these so as i collapse them notice that there's no information being displayed here i can open just employee if i want to all my expenses spent by an employee here i can open partner a all my expenses spent by partner a let's say i want to change the general grouping that i'm using i can click on the customize report and change the who spent it tag group to maybe the sales person and then click on run report now i have an entirely different report i have all my sales by uh salesperson you can also get to these tag based reports by clicking on the reports tab on the left hand side and then on the reports and then under find report name just type tag and you're going to see profit and loss by tag and transaction list by tag which is the one we just saw let's check out profit and loss by tag and let's do again last month because we were focused on transactions just for last month and let's do um in this case another tag here let's go to customize report and then under columns we'll pick a sales person and then click on run report so now i'm going to have a profit and loss by salesperson based on those tags i can click on customize the button again i can click on the drop down menu and do it by who spent it click on run report then there's all my expenditures based on who spent the money and then i can click on customize report and i can change that to my other tag which is expand source and then click on run report and there we go now the one thing that you may have noticed is there's an option here called untagged groups on tag groups is when you have tags that don't belong to a group so let me show you how that will work let me click keep this report up here and go back into my tags screen so i'm going to go back go back into tags and then let's say i'm going to create some tags that don't have a group so i'm going to click on new and click on tag and i'm gonna call this uh business save and then i'm gonna create another tag called uh just a tag called personal and notice that i didn't give these any group and that's possible too you don't you're not forced to create groupings and limited groupings of those tags on group tags work slightly different for example i'm going to pull up one of these transactions that i opened up recently and under the tag section i can actually select both uh business and personal in this case so when you do untagged groups then you're not forced to only use one tag from that tag group they're basically loose and you can use them in any way shape or form that you want so i'm going to click on save and close here i'll pick another transaction just so we can illustrate the example and we'll call this one personal and then go back to save and close i'm going to go back to the previous report which is a profit and loss report by tag group click on customize and select untag ungroup tags and click on run report and then you can see where uh this profit and losses only focus on those ungrouped tags one little strange quirky thing about this which i think is worth mentioning is let's say for example i open up this 2098 transaction and i'm going to open it up and then i'm going to give it both tags in this case i'm going to give it both business and the personal tag and then click on save and close and then i'm going to go backwards on my reporting notice that now that the transaction shows in both sides so it's really up to you this is why i like the tag groups because i'm basically i'm protected to make sure that my transactions won't get duplicated but when you use ungroup tags you always run that risk that you can inadvertently duplicate the transactions in your report it doesn't duplicate it in your overall profit and loss there's only one transaction but specifically on the profit and loss by on ungroup tags you run into this potential situation and the last thing i'll mention here is i'm gonna go into banking and and just look at the transactions that were downloaded from the bank and then show you how tags interact uh with your bank fees with your downloads so for example here state farm let's say i'm gonna do this correctly and put my uh my payee create my state farm payee and do the right category insurance whatever it happens to be auto insurance then there's the tax button and then then i can pick how i want to tag this so let's say this is in town and then this is john's actually no salesperson this is an employee expenditure it is business and there you go so you can interact with those uh tags in most transactions and in bank feeds as well whoa that's uh that was a lot of content for one video i know i'm very excited about tags and this is just the first iteration of it i think that we're going to be blown away with potentially what could be coming with tags so if you like this video make sure you hit like that's a really important thing uh subscribe to the channel we're just hitting 100 000 subscribers and going for a million subscribers so if you want to learn more about quickbooks accounting uh saving money on your taxes and general business advice you want to subscribe to my channel hit that bell so you get notified when great new content like this comes out and hopefully this was helpful for you hopefully i'll see you on the next video thank you