Categories and Tags serve different purposes:
Categories (Column C) are your G/L accounts — like "Meals & Entertainment", "Travel", or "Office Supplies". AI assigns these automatically when processing a receipt based on your chart of accounts. You can customize available categories in Settings.
Tags (Column K) are user-defined groupings that cut across categories — like "Las Vegas Trip", "Project: Website Redesign", or "Client: Johnson & Co". A single tag might include meals, flights, hotels, and Uber rides.
Key differences: • Categories = auto-assigned by AI, one per expense, matches your accounting system • Tags = user-defined, for grouping expenses by trip/client/project across all categories
How reports use each: • Report by Date Range — Pulls expenses from a date period, automatically summarizes by category in a separate tab. No extra steps needed. • Report by Tag — Pulls all expenses with a specific tag (across all categories and dates). • Year-End Report — Includes every expense for the year (even those already in other reports), with each category summarized on its own tab.
Common mistake — don't create tags that repeat category names. A tag called "Meals", "Travel", or "Software Subscriptions" duplicates work the Category column already does automatically, and your reports gain nothing. The test: a category answers what kind of expense is this? — a tag answers who or what was it for? "Travel" is a category; "Trip – Bali" is a tag. "Meals" is a category; "Client – Johnson & Co" is a tag.
Tip: ExpenseBot can propose high-confidence trip groups and extensions of an existing client or project tag in Review expenses. It shows the exact expenses first and never applies a tag without your approval. Client/project suggestions reuse an active tag you already created; they do not guess a client from location.