How do I track expenses for a project that involves several different vendors?

A project rarely comes from one supplier. A launch might involve a venue, a creative studio, and an equipment supplier — three merchants, three categories, one project. Tags are how you pull them back together.

🏷️ Create the project tag

Open Settings > Expense Tags > Manage tags (or Create tags if no active custom tags are listed), then choose Projects under Quick setup. This opens a focused tag-creation flow.

Enter the project name, review the proposed Project – Name tag, and save it. Nothing is created until you confirm, and creating a project tag does not overwrite or replace custom tags you already use.

📋 The workflow

1. Create the tag with the focused Projects setup (above).
2. Review existing expenses. After creating any tag, ExpenseBot offers Review expenses when there are expenses available to organize.
3. Apply it to every expense that supports the project, whichever merchant it came from.
4. Leave your normal categories alone. Travel stays Travel, Meals stays Meals, Equipment stays Equipment. The category still answers what kind of expense was this?
5. Fix anything later in Review expenses. You can change a tag on an older expense, or select several expenses and apply one tag to all of them at once — useful when you create the tag partway into a project. When ExpenseBot finds a high-confidence pattern extending an active project tag, it may show a Client/project suggestion with the exact expenses. Apply or dismiss it; no tag is changed automatically.
6. Build the report from My Reports → Create a report → By Tag, choosing your project tag.
7. Keep tagging as the project runs. Each report you create is a fixed snapshot of what existed when you made it — later expenses do not silently join a report you already generated. Create a fresh report when you want an up-to-date total.

🧭 Category vs tag — they answer different questions

• Category: what kind of expense was it? (Travel, Meals, Equipment)
• Tag: which project, client, trip, or engagement was it for?

The merchant and notes already tell you who you paid — the venue, the studio, the supplier. The tag answers the question the merchant can't: which project did this support? Project tags are an extra layer for your own reporting; they are not a substitute for accounting categories, so don't retire your categories in favour of tags.

👥 Teams: one agreed project name for everyone

If your account has more than one seat, a Team Admin can push an approved project tag to selected teammates from Team Management → Push Settings → Project Tags. You choose which teammates receive it, so the whole team files against one consistent project name instead of five spellings of it. Each teammate still keeps their own ExpenseBot sheet and their own expenses — sharing the tag shares the label, not the data.

📌 What this is and isn't

This is expense capture organised by project: receipts collected, tagged, and reported. It is not project-management, budgeting, or time-tracking software — ExpenseBot records what you actually spent rather than planning what you intend to spend.

ExpenseBot currently stores one primary tag per expense. If a project expense also belongs to a client or trip, choose the tag that should drive the report. ExpenseBot does not silently store a hidden second tag.

💬 Tell us what you need

If something here is confusing, doesn't work the way you expected, or you need another feature for how your projects run, email support@expensebot.ai and describe how you'd like it to work. We read every feature request.

🔗 Related: Project expense tracker · Categories vs tags · Managing tags · Applying a tag to past expenses