Tags: Tracking a Project, Event, or Appeal Across Your Books

Funds answer "whose money is this?" and accounts answer "what kind of income or expense?" A tag answers a third question: "what was this for?" Tag the revenue and the spending for a gala, a mission trip, a capital appeal, or a one-off project, and you can pull that project's income and expenses out of the books on demand, whichever funds and accounts they touched.

Where: left menu Donations → Tags. Available on plans that include tags; campaigns and grants create their own automatically on every plan.

Two kinds of tags

• Automatic tags are created for you: one for every campaign and one for every grant. They're how GoodBooks knows what money was raised for and spent against, and they power the release of restricted gifts (see Restricted vs. Unrestricted Money). Grant tags show in the list with the type grant; campaign tags are managed from the campaign itself. You don't need to touch either.
• Your own tags are anything else worth isolating. Give each a name, a type (Campaign, Appeal, Event, or General; purely a label for sorting), a color, and a description. Inactivate a tag when the project ends and it drops out of the pickers while its history stays.

Putting tags on transactions

Every entry surface has a Spend Against picker on revenue and expense lines: the checkbook register (desktop and phone), manual journal entries (per line), the credit card register, and the gift forms. Pick the tag when you record the transaction and you're done; the picker lists campaigns, grants, and your own tags together.

Tags sit on individual lines, not whole entries, so a check split across three purposes can carry three different tags.

Getting the answer back

• Income Statement and Balance Sheet have a Tag filter: choose the gala's tag and you get the gala's revenue, its expenses, and the net, regardless of fund. The Balance Sheet under a tag filter shows a note instead of the Balanced badge, since a tag only ever touches some lines of an entry.
• The Usage column on the Tags list shows how many lines carry each tag, with a link to them.
• Grant and campaign tags feed the grant reports and campaign totals automatically.

Good to know

• Tags don't move money or affect fund balances. They're a lens, which is exactly why you can add them freely without worrying about the books.
• Use a fund when money is legally or by board policy separate. Use a tag when you just want to know what something cost.
• A tag can be applied after the fact by editing the journal entry's lines, following the correction rules in Fixing Mistakes in the Register.