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How to use advanced tag conditions to boost your budgeting and reporting?
How to use advanced tag conditions to boost your budgeting and reporting?

You can create budgets and reports including some tags but not others.

Iliya Yordanov avatar
Written by Iliya Yordanov
Updated over a week ago

Imagine a scenario: you regularly visit a restaurant in your hometown called "Financial Cuisine". When entering those expenses in MoneyWiz you enter "Financial Cuisine" as the payee and "Food & Dining / Restaurants" as the category. The food is so good that one day you decide to invite your potential business partner for a lunch.

Since that expense is not personal but business, you might want to tag it as such. The payee is still "Financial Cuisine", the category (probably, but it depends on your setup) is still "Food & Dining / Restaurants". In order to differentiate this expense from personal expenses, you decide to add a "business" tag.

If you have a budget monitoring the "Food & Dining / Restaurants" category or wish to generate a report for "Financial Cuisine" payee, you can tell MoneyWiz to exclude the "business" tag if needed. Here's how.

To begin, click on the tags field. If you're creating a budget, click on "Select tags" and then click on the search box to bring focus there. If you're generating a report: similarly click on the tags field (remember that many reports allow you to "Add filter"), un-select any tags you might see there then start typing in the search bar.

What follows is relevant to both budgets and reports -- the syntax is the same.

MoneyWiz supports the following operators:

  • AND

  • OR

  • NOT

  • ( and )

What's important is that between each of those operators you need to put a space. So if you were to exclude your "business" tag from budgets/reports, you'd type:

NOT business

and press Enter. This would show you all transactions that don't have "business" tag attached.

But there's more! You can build very complex conditions. Let's say you have 4 children and wish to check spending for older vs younger:

( Kyle OR Emma ) AND NOT ( Bob OR Kate )

This would show you only transactions tagged with "Kyle" or "Emma" and would not show transactions tagged with "Bob" or "Kate".

Remember about spaces! If you were to type

(Kyle OR Emma)

instead, MoneyWiz would create a condition to show transactions with tags "(Kyle" or "Emma)".

Also please note that you cannot use those conditions to create transactions. If you enter "NOT personal" during transaction entry, you'll end up with a brand new tag "NOT personal". The conditions are meant only for searching and matching, and not for tagging.

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