Tags or no tags?

from Eric

If I remember correctly, one use case we discussed before is: you have some business-related transactions in a number of your expense accounts. You want to be able, in some report, to extract only the business-related computer-related transactions. One way is to tag all your business transactions as "business". The other way is to have more accounts. For example, you would have "Travel" and "Business Travel", etc.

To me, tags on transactions only hide the need for more accounts.

Tags on accounts could be more useful. If, for example, you didn't group your business transactions all together in a "Business" group, but they are all scattered around in different groups, you might want to tag all business-related accounts and refer to them later as a group. Even there, I fail to see a use case that would make this truly useful. If you have business transactions that you want to see separately, it only makes sense that you put all your business-related transactions in a real "Business" group.

Anyway, that's my take on the subject. Let the discussion begin.

Because the only use case I have for tags is mine, and that, effectively, it just hides a lack of accounts (but having a "HS" version for all accounts is kind of ugly), maybe we could wait until after 1.0. I think it won't be long until we have other use case from the users.

Wow! That was a short discussion. Postponing to "Future".

The question of tags have been revived by this GS thread

One of the reasons I needed to merge so many accounts in #51 No Ability to Merge Accounts was because of my past use of classes in Quicken. Maybe the importer could ignore the part of a category name following a slash, and instead tag the transaction with the class name. I'm not convinced that tags (or "classes") are actually useful, however.