Understanding the usage of tag report
A tag report tells us how each direct child tag is doing. Perhaps it's better to be explained in the following example.
Supposingly we keep tag tracking of our expenses on food( breakfast, lunch, dinner, other), it would be useful for us to see how much we spent totally on breakfast, lunch and dinner, how often do we eat out, what is the average cost per meal, this can be easily done in AccPal.
Frequency and Average are new features in report. Frequency tells you how many transactions are associated with the tag or the person. Average is basically the Amount divided by the frequency. Now let's see how it can be useful in real life situation.
This example assumes that user is already familiar with using tags and tagging transactions.
We create the following tag structure, notice Food is the parent tag of breakfast, lunch, dinner and other:
Let's try to add a few transactions for reporting data source, 1 breakfast, 4 lunches, and 4 dinners:
Now we can start tag report, by going to Menu -> report, on Tagerted Tag, click select, make sure "Food" is selected and shown, and that "Child tags" are selected(black text), as following. We'll ignore other settings for this example because we don't really need it, Click "View Report":
The following 3 pictures provide us with detail information on each direct child tag under "Food", notice "Other" is not shown because we don't have any transactions associated with it:
This is how easy we can use tags to help us to get more information out of daily expenses, we are able to find out how many times we've had breakfast, lunch and dinner, the total cost and average cost.
The possible application of this feature is unlimited, user may tag and compare cars to keep tracking of gasoline cost, or tag and compare how much money user spends on each trip, or more.
We'd like to explain a little bit more about tag report. This time, on Targeted Tag, we select "Food", and "This Tag".
This will allow us to find out how much money we spent on food. Notice we never really tag any transactions to "Food", but only to its children.
AccPal is smart enough to know that breakfast, lunch and dinner is under "Food", and calculate the total amount, as shown below:
We may also set date range, specify account or currency, limit to expense, income or balance to further refine the report result if necessary.
