Tags are another recent innovation from the Saasu labs team. Tags are simply one or more words that mean something to you. The shorter the better we find.

Tags are a uniquely Internet centric way of labelling and filing information in multiple ways and multiple places. Tags have been around for many years on sites such as digg and del.icio.us but we think we are the first to bring them to financial management.

Tags can be found in the tag cloud, just one click will mark something (e.g. a customer) with the tag. You can also just type the tag in, if the system doesn’t know about that tag yet it will add it for you automatically and start tracking usage for you. The tag cloud appears on most add/edit screens plus of course on lists as a filter option.

Tags may be applied to any information, such as -

• contacts (e.g. customer, supplier, prospect, partner)
• activities (e.g. Project X, unassigned, critical path,
• transactions (e.g. urgent, delayed, Project X, Portfolio Q)
• employees (e.g. Project X, Skill Y, Location C)
• inventory items (e.g. Hot Seller, Warehouse A)
• investment items (e.g. Defensive, Review Due, Location C)

The power of tags lies in a the way they can be combined in infinite ways, e.g. how much did we spend on urgent expenses for project x last month? Include this tag, exclude those tags. You can start to see how powerful they are.

Key Benefits are -

• Tags can go on anything (for now we have enabled ten of our most popular add/edit screens, more to come)
• You can track how many things have that tag on them (in the tag list on the bottom of the main menu)
• Tags are super flexible, they can be combined in an unlimited number of ways
• Tags cross over everything, e.g. for a project you can tag Customers, Suppliers, Resources (Staff), Activities, expenses, income and more)

Here are some guidelines on the ways we think you should use tags -

• Keep them short, one or two words are best. Too many tags means the tag cloud can clutter up your screen (it automatically adjusts to prevent this but hey then you have to go digging in ‘more tags’)
• Use them for the important stuff, the 20% of projects that make the most difference to you, too many tags means more clutter and you are not focussing on the big picture
• Just because they are easy to add doesn’t mean you should, focus on the big initiatives that are important to you
• Ask yourself, are tags the best way to track this? In some cases they are good for problems that don’t have more structured procedures or solutions yet. For example tags work well for job tracking but is that the best way for your business in the long term? What will your data look like after you have months of jobs in there? Perhaps just track open work?
• Use tags for living data, i.e. stuff that is ‘in play’ and active such as orders due to ship or projects/jobs currently being worked on. You can also use tags for lots of other things such as traditional reporting but that is not their main benefit.
• Stay ahead of tag use in your team, agreed tag naming standards and stick to them, if you have a meeting agreeing to start a new project, setup the tag immediately and flag it as ‘popular’ so it always appears on the tag cloud that ensures it gets used, similarly if you decide to phase something out make it ‘inactive’ so it no longer appears in the tag cloud for Saasu users in your team.

Tags are available in our new release due soon, so try the preview or read more about tags.