Transaction Tags Are Here: Track Spending Across Categories, Trips, and Projects

If you've ever come back from holiday and tried to figure out exactly how much the whole thing cost, you know the problem. The flights are under Transport. The restaurants are under Dining Out. The museum tickets are under Entertainment. The hotel is under Travel. You end up either scrolling through four different category reports and adding numbers up on a napkin, or giving up and accepting that you'll never really know.

Categories are good at answering "what did I spend money on?" but terrible at answering "what was this spending for?" Those are different questions, and until now, most budgeting apps (including ours) only answered the first one.

Today we're shipping transaction tags across web, iOS, and Android. Tags are a second dimension for organising your transactions. They work alongside categories, not instead of them. A restaurant bill can be categorised as Dining Out and tagged "Italy 2026" at the same time. A taxi can be Transport and "Business Q2" at the same time. You can then pull up a report that shows everything tagged "Italy 2026" broken down by amount, or filter any existing report to just the transactions with that tag.

How tags work

A tag is just a short label you create. "Holiday2026", "Reimbursable", "Wedding", "Tax Deductible", "Side Hustle". Whatever makes sense for the way you think about your money. You can assign multiple tags to a single transaction, which is the key difference from categories (where each transaction belongs to exactly one).

You add tags when creating or editing a transaction, or during the bank transaction review process. Start typing and it autocompletes from your existing tags. If the tag doesn't exist yet, hit Enter and it gets created on the spot. Each tag gets a colour, so they're easy to spot in your transaction list as small coloured dots next to the payee name.

There's a dedicated Tags page (in the sidebar, next to Payees and Categories) where you can rename, recolour, merge duplicates, or delete tags you no longer need. Merging is worth calling out: if you accidentally created both "Holiday" and "Vacation" and tagged different transactions with each, you can merge them into one and all the transactions follow.

The Spending by Tag report

The new Spending by Tag report lives under Reports in the sidebar. It shows a horizontal bar chart of your spending grouped by tag, with each bar coloured to match the tag. Below that is a summary table, and below that is a full list of the tagged transactions themselves. Click any bar or row in the summary and the transaction list filters to just that tag.

One thing to understand about tag totals: because a transaction can have multiple tags, the tag totals will often add up to more than your actual total spending. A dinner that's tagged both "Italy 2026" and "Business" shows up under both. We show this clearly in the report so there's no confusion. It's not a bug, it's how cross-cutting dimensions work.

Tags also work as a filter in every existing report. Open the filter dialog on Spending by Category, Spending by Payee, Income vs Expense, or Detailed Transactions and you'll see a new Tags tab. Select one or more tags and the report narrows to just those transactions. This means you can answer questions like "what categories did my holiday spending fall into?" without any manual work.

Practical examples

Here are some of the ways we think tags will be most useful. None of these were easy to do before without manually exporting data and working in a spreadsheet.

Trip and holiday budgeting

Create a tag for each trip: "Portugal May 2026", "Christmas London", "Ski Trip 2027". Tag every transaction related to that trip as you go. When you get home, pull up the Spending by Tag report and you'll see the exact total cost, broken down by transaction, with the ability to click through to see which categories your trip spending fell into. Next year when you're planning a similar trip, you have a real number to budget against instead of a guess.

Tracking reimbursable expenses

If your employer reimburses certain expenses, tag them "Reimbursable" when they happen. At the end of the month, open the Spending by Tag report, filter to "Reimbursable", and you have your claim ready. No more scrolling through bank statements trying to remember which coffee was a client meeting and which was just Tuesday morning.

Tax season preparation

Self-employed or have side income? Tag deductible purchases throughout the year: "Tax 2026/27", or get more specific with "Business Equipment", "Professional Development", "Home Office". When January rolls around and you need to file your self-assessment, the tagged transaction list is your starting point. No more annual panic of reconstructing a year's worth of receipts.

Project-based spending

Renovating a bathroom? Planning a wedding? Building a home gym? Create a tag for the project and apply it to every related purchase, regardless of which category it falls under. The plumber goes under Home Maintenance, the tiles go under Shopping, the new mirror goes under Furnishing. But they're all tagged "Bathroom Reno" and you can see the running total at any time.

Comparing events across years

Tag your Christmas spending each year: "Christmas 2025", "Christmas 2026". At a glance you can compare totals and see whether your festive spending is creeping up or holding steady. The same works for birthdays, annual holidays, or any recurring event that doesn't map cleanly to a single budget category.

Splitting costs between partners

If you and a partner split certain costs but keep separate finances, tag shared expenses: "Shared Groceries", "Shared Bills". At the end of the month, the tag report gives you a clean total to split. This is especially handy for couples who are splitting some costs but not others, and don't want the overhead of a joint account for everything.

A few things tags don't do (on purpose)

Tags are deliberately simple in this first version. There's no auto-tagging ("automatically tag any Airbnb transaction as Travel"). That's something we're considering for a future update, but we wanted to ship the core tagging and reporting first and see how people actually use it before building automation on top.

Tags are also user-scoped, meaning each person has their own set. There's no sharing or syncing tags between accounts. And there's no bulk tagging yet. For now you tag transactions one at a time, either when you create them, during bank import review, or by editing them afterwards. Bulk tagging is on the list for a follow-up if demand warrants it.

Getting started

Tags are available right now on web, iOS, and Android. You'll see a new Tags item in the sidebar. Start by creating a couple of tags for whatever you're currently tracking or curious about. Tag a few transactions and pull up the Spending by Tag report to see it in action.

If you've been using Endute for a while and have historical transactions you'd like to tag retroactively, you can edit any past transaction to add tags. The report will pick them up immediately. There's no time limit on when a transaction can be tagged.

We'd love to hear how you end up using tags. The feature was one of the most commonly requested additions from users who moved to Endute from other budgeting tools, and we suspect there are use cases we haven't thought of yet. If you come up with a creative tagging system that works well for you, let us know.