One of the services that used Nationwide’s automatic downloads was Wesabe. On the Wesabe forums recently a member of the community asked about the best approach to tagging transactions. Here’s a post about how to get the best results from Wesabe tags.
Basics: What is a tag?
Each tag is a single word or string of words that help you describe and manage each transactions. Once you have used a tag more than once, you will be able to see ‘zoom in’ to see only the transactions that have that tag assigned. Click a tag name in the Wesabe dashboard to see spending patterns for just that tag.
Tags and keywords became popular in blogs, photo sharing and bookmarking sites to make it easier to find content. For example, good tags for a photo would be: names of people in the photo, dominant colours, the time of year, the type of camera used. I’ve found it’s better to take a simpler approach to tags in Wesabe, and I’ll explain why in the post below.
Examples of Wesabe tags
Basic examples of tags provided by Wesabe are ‘cash’, ‘holiday’, ‘food’ or ‘movies’. They are a great way of adding extra context to your monthly budget, and extra helpful when you track lots of different accounts, from one bank or many – this way you can see true spending patterns across all of your money rather than the information provided by your online banking provider.
Suggested tags to get started
My popular tags came from using a desktop program called Microsoft Money. In Money, you had a predefined set of primary and secondary categories to get you started. For example, the primary tag of ‘food’ is helpful to see how much you spend on groceries and eating out, but by using a secondary tag of ‘home’ or ‘work’ will help you see where the bulk of your spending happens and where you could make savings.
Here are a few common tags that apply to 99% of my monthly spending:
- bank
- bills
- cash
- clothing
- entertainment
- exercise
- expenses
- food
- gift
- health
- hobbies
- holiday
- home
- InterAccTransfer*
- special-occasion
- technology
- travel
- wages
- work
* Wesabe has a built-in ‘transfer’ setting but I keep these separate with a tag
Advice on choosing tags
There are no rules – choose any tag you want. If you use them like me to track spending over weeks and months, they’re most useful when you use them more than once. In that sense, it doesn’t matter what you choose so long as it’s memorable and consistent.
Why single tags are better than multi-dimensional tags
Money can only be spent once. I find it’s hard to manage money at all, never mind managing it in more than one way.
If you to manage your money to a budget or see trends emerge in your spending patters, I’ve found it’s important to start with a common set a strucutred approach to tags.
Uploading statements then tagging your transactions is already one extra time commitment. Keep it simple and stick to a single tag system. It will be easier to balance your finances that way.
I’ll find some time later this week to describe a more advanced approach: Two-tier tagging
Comments please!
Reply in a comment if you do things differently, or if you’ve got anything to say on the subject of tagging.
