What are categories and subcategories?
In Quicken, categories and subcategories are used to classify and group your transactions. This grouping is displayed in reports and graphs and helps you analyze your transactions.
For example: bills and utilities, paycheck, business income.
What are tags?
Tags provide an additional way to classify and group your transactions. They help you group and analyze all transactions related to a specific event. Here is an example.
You went on a vacation with your family and you need to keep track of all the expenses related to that vacation. Create the tag vacation and associate all your related transactions, from multiple categories, with this tag. Here are some transactions that you might associate with this tag:
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Dinner: Categorized as Food & Dining
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Fuel: Categorized as Auto & Transport
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Clothing: Categorized as Shopping
To see the total cost of your vacation, run a custom report that includes all transactions with the vacation tag.
Differences between categories and tags
Categories are used for similar types of expenses. Because only a single category can be assigned to each transaction, category tracking helps you create reports that show you what proportion of your money is going to which kind of expense. Quicken automatically categorizes many of the transactions you download, based on your past categorizations and its knowledge of which payees belong in which categories. For transactions that Quicken does not recognize (for example, your rent check), you need to categorize those manually until Quicken learns that your payment to "Mr. Roper" belongs in the category "Rent."
Tags, by contrast, let you see how much you're spending for a specific purpose, like a hobby or a vacation. While categories are assigned to similar types of expenses, tags are usually assigned to expenses from different categories. You can also assign as many tags to each transaction as you like -- you can only assign one category.
For example, suppose you want to know how much you're spending on a vacation to Florida. You would create a tag called "Florida vacation" and then apply that tag to any expense going toward that vacation -- your flight, rental car, hotel room, meals, a new bathing suit, a boat rental. To see how much that vacation cost, go to the Spending Cloud (under the Reports section of the Source list) and click the "Florida vacation" tag. Quicken displays the total for that tag, as well as a list of all expenses that have that tag.
Because you can use multiple tags for each transaction, you can also assign other tags to some of those Florida vacation expenses for other tracking purposes. For example, if you are also tracking how much you're spending on your boating hobby, you could assign a "Florida vacation" tag to the boat rental and also tag it with "Boating hobby." Use the Spending Cloud to see how much you're spending overall on that activity.
Keep these distinctions in mind:
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Each transaction can have only one category.
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Each transaction can have as many tags as you want (for example: Florida vacation, Boating hobby, Jane trips, Sam trips, Vacations 2010).
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Use categories to track different types of expenses.
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Use tags to track different purposes for which the expenses were used.
Additional information