Tags would be for things that span across multiple categories / sub-categories, for example:
- Transactions related to that specific holiday (“Brazil January 2023”).
- Transactions related to dating (“Dating”).
- If you lost your luggage, tag transactions related to replacing those items (“Lost Luggage 2023”).
- Transactions that I need to include in my tax filing (“Tax 2023”).
In scenarios 1, 2, and 3, the tags help answer “why” there was a particular transaction. In scenario 4, the tags serve as a way to easily find the transaction again in future.
In all scenarios, the category provides the information about “what” the transaction was for. If you used custom categories instead of tags for the scenarios listed above, you would lose this.
The combination of category, sub-category, and tagging enables users to answer a really broad range of questions about their spending behaviour, and hopefully identify areas where they can make improvements.
For example, if you wanted to better understand your eating out and dating habbits:
- What type of eating out is costing me the most? (“Eating out” category, broken down by sub-category)
- If I exclude money spent on dates, what type of eating our is costing me the most? (“Eating out” category, broken down by sub-category, filtered to transactions tagged “dating”)
- How much am I spending on dating? (transactions tagged “dating”)
- Which dating activities are costing me the most? (transactions tagged “dating” broken down by category/sub-category)
In the scenario where the user has lost their luggage, it’s useful to have all those transactions tagged so it’s easy to find them again if you need to make an insurance claim; you could even have a separate tag for “Insurance claimed” and “Insurance paid”. If they did this as categories, it would clog up their category list, and makes it harder to find in future (“Was the transaction for those jeans under shopping or insurance - I can’t remember” vs “I’ll just look through my Shopping → Clothing sub-category”).
Additionally, the user might want to exclude all transactions related to their lost luggage from their Shopping budget (because it’s not a typical situation and they don’t want to skew their trends). If there was a way to search for all transactions tagged “Lost Luggage 2023” and then bulk edit the transactions from the search result, this would be really easy.