What are Tags?
Aplos Tags are an optional, powerful add-on feature that extends the capabilities of your chart of accounts and fund accounting structure. They are designed to give you further categorization of your income and expenses, allowing for more dimensional reporting insights into your organization's financial activity. For example, let’s say your organization is hosting a series of fundraisers for your Building Fund. Although all money raised will end up in your Building Fund, you may still want to track the income and expense for each of the fundraisers separately to evaluate how profitable each one was. You can easily do this by creating a Tag for each fundraiser (e.g. "Winter Building Fundraiser"). You can choose the proper fundraiser's Tag each time you enter a transaction for that fundraiser. Once the fundraiser is complete, you can generate a transaction list or income statement by Tag. You may also have heard these referred to as classes in other programs. This guide will provide resources on Tags—what they are, how to set them up and how to generate helpful reports.
Key Benefits of Utilizing Tags:
-
Detailed Program Tracking: Easily track the profitability or spending of specific, often temporary, programs, grants, or fundraising events (e.g., "Annual Gala" or "Summer Camp Project").
-
Departmental Reporting: Assign transactions to specific departments or locations (tags) to give department heads the reports they need to manage their budgets efficiently.
-
Simplified Compliance: Aplos includes a dedicated 990 Tag feature that helps you map expenses to the required categories (Program Service, Management & General, and Fundraising), simplifying the preparation of your annual Form 990.
-
Advanced Budgeting: With Advanced Budgeting enabled, you can create a budget specifically for an individual Tag (e.g., the budget for your new "Expansion Project"), ensuring you stay on track for that initiative.
It is important to remember that Tags are an optional tracking tool for income and expenses—they do not appear on the Balance Sheet like Funds do. They are simply powerful modifiers that allow you to slice and dice your financial data for highly specific reporting. Learn more about the difference between funds and tags in Aplos.
Pricing and Management Details
The Tag feature is an optional subscription add-on. Here are a few important details to keep in mind regarding its cost and administration:
-
Cost Per Layer: Aplos offers up to five distinct Tag layers or dimensions (e.g., Projects, Departments, Custom). Each Tag dimension is an extra cost of $30 per month, which an Admin user can view and activate directly from the Tags screen (found under Fund Accounting > Accounts > Tags).
-
Enabling/Disabling: If you are an Admin, you can easily disable a Tag dimension using the toggle switch on the Tags screen. However, to stop being billed for the dimension, you must also go to your Subscription page to remove it.
-
Reporting History: If you disable a Tag layer and later choose to re-enable it, all of your historical reporting data tied to those specific tags will remain available, and the Tag-based reports will reappear on your report screen.
Using Tags in Aplos
Enabling and using Tags happens in 3 main steps. Click on each step below to learn more about the details to complete each step.
You have now successfully added, entered, and reported on Tags! If you have any questions about Tags, or anything else Aplos, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our customer care team.