In AtivaMoney, every transaction can have one category and several tags. The category answers the question "what type of spending is this?" — Food, Transport, Health. The tag answers another, equally important question: "what context does this spending belong to?" This is where things get interesting.
A tag is a free-form label that you define. You can use any word, in any combination, for any transaction. It sounds simple — and it is — but the power this gives your financial analysis is considerable. Here are five ways to use tags that will change how you understand your money.
1. Tags by household member
In a family, expenses are shared but spending patterns are individual. With categories alone, you know that you spent 800€ on food — but you do not know whether it was John who took his colleagues out for dinner, Mary who did the weekly shopping, or the kids with their weekend trips to McDonald's.
With tags like John, Mary, Kids or Family, you can assign each transaction to the person who generated the spending. The practical result? You can see exactly how much each household member drives in monthly expenses, identify who contributes most to particular categories, and have financial conversations based on real data instead of perceptions.
This approach is especially useful for couples who want to balance their contributions to shared expenses, or for parents who want to understand the real cost of having children at different stages of life.
2. Tags by event or trip
A trip to the Algarve in August generates dozens of transactions spread across several categories: fuel in Transport, meals in Food, water park tickets in Leisure, stays in Accommodation. With categories alone, it is impossible to know how much that week of holiday cost in total.
With the tag Algarve Holiday 2026 applied to all those transactions, a quick filter by that tag gives you the total cost of the trip, broken down by category. You know the trip cost 1,340€ — and that of that total, 420€ went on accommodation, 280€ on restaurants, 180€ on fuel and the rest on activities.
This view is valuable not only for understanding the past, but for planning the future. Next year, when you are planning the summer holidays, you have real data on what it costs and where the money goes.
3. Tags by financial project
Some spending is not day-to-day expenses — it is investment in projects with a defined duration. Home renovations, buying a new car, building an emergency fund, preparing for a wedding. These situations generate spending over months, across completely different categories, and are hard to track without a tagging system.
Tags like Home Renovation, New Car or Emergency Fund let you aggregate every transaction related to a specific project, regardless of its category. You can see the cumulative project cost to date, compare it with the planned budget, and understand whether you are on plan or drifting off course.
For projects like home renovations — where costs tend to be underestimated and creep up — this kind of tracking can be the difference between a financial surprise and an informed decision about when to stop.
4. Tags by work context
For freelancers, self-employed people, or simply anyone with work expenses paid by their employer, distinguishing personal spending from work spending is essential — both for financial control and for tax purposes.
Tags like Work Expenses, Reimbursable or Tax Deductible let you quickly filter every expense with professional relevance. When tax season arrives, you do not need to dig through bank statements looking for receipts — every deductible expense is already labelled and ready to export.
For anyone with expenses to be reimbursed by their company, the Reimbursable tag creates a pending list that you can cross-check against reimbursements received, making sure no expense gets forgotten.
5. Tags for special analysis
Sometimes you want to run an ad hoc analysis that does not fit any of the existing categories. You want to understand how much you spend on digital subscriptions in total (Netflix, Spotify, software, paid newsletters). You want to isolate every expense from a particular month that was "non-essential". You want to flag transactions that need reviewing for possible cancellation.
Temporary tags like Subscriptions, Non-essential or Review create ad hoc layers of analysis that you can use for a specific exercise and then remove. It is like having a highlighter on your bank statements — a simple tool that does exactly what you need when you need it.
For annual finance reviews, combining seasonal tags with date filters is especially powerful: you can compare summer 2025 with summer 2026, or see how December spending compares across the years.
The AI that learns your tags
Applying tags manually to every transaction would, naturally, be too much work for most people. That is why AtivaMoney includes an AI model that learns your tagging patterns and starts suggesting tags automatically.
At first, you define and apply the tags. But as the system accumulates data on your patterns — this supermarket always gets the Mary tag, petrol purchases on Fridays get the Work Expenses tag — the AI begins to pre-fill suggestions. You confirm or correct them with a click, and the model learns from each correction.
Over time, most transactions arrive already tagged correctly, with no intervention on your part. The system becomes so accurate that tags stop being a task and simply become the way your data is organised automatically. It is the difference between actively managing your finances and just having the data always organised.