Label Transactions by Project or Cost Center

Two projects, two clients, and no way to tell which one made money this year. The chart of accounts cannot answer that: both projects book to the same 61 accounts and invoice through the same 70 accounts. The usual workaround is a second expense account per project, and two years later the chart has forty accounts that all mean "subcontracting".

Financica now has labels for this. A label is a short piece of text on a transaction: project:acme, client:north, costcenter:workshop. Nothing is posted to the ledger. A label changes no account, amount or date, so adding or removing one leaves the books, the VAT return and the annual accounts exactly as they were. Labels are available on the Core plan and above.

Adding a label

Open any transaction. The Labels section is at the bottom of the Details tab. Click Add label, pick an existing label from the list, or type a new name and choose Create. A label applies to the whole transaction, every line of it. Remove one by clicking the cross on its chip; nothing else changes.

A few things worth noting:

• Names are lowercase. Typing Project:Acme gives you project:acme, and typing it again on another transaction reuses the same label. Spaces at either end are dropped; accents are kept.
• Labels are free text up to 60 characters, and a colon is fine. A key:value convention works well if you track more than one dimension: project:acme and costcenter:workshop on the same transaction. Typing project: in the search shows everything under that prefix.
• Editing a transaction keeps its labels. Splitting it across accounts, linking it to an invoice or recategorizing it changes the lines, not the transaction, so the label stays and nothing is double-counted.
• Everyone with access to the books sees the same labels, your accountant included. Anyone who can edit transactions can add or create one.
• Labels are applied one transaction at a time for now, and there is no rename, merge or export yet. Label changes are not written to the transaction's activity log.

Reading a per-project income statement

The income statement shows a label filter next to the date picker once your company has its first label. Select one or more labels and the report covers the transactions carrying any of them. Two labels selected means "either", not "both". The print view applies the same selection, and both the screen and the printout say which labels are applied, so a filtered statement cannot be mistaken for the full one.

The balance sheet and the trial balance do not have this filter. A label sits on a whole transaction, and a subset of transactions does not balance, so those reports always cover the whole company.

Limits

Labels are not extra accounts. Nothing is posted against them and the chart does not change. Filtering the Belgian Compte de résultats produces a management extract; the statutory statement you file is the unfiltered one.

There is no percentage split. A label covers the whole transaction, and a transaction with two labels counts in full under each. You cannot split one cost 60/40 across two projects.

Available now at the bottom of every transaction page on the Core plan and above. The income statement filter appears once your company has its first label.