The loss of tags is particularly unhelpful for UK charities
I'm interested in whether other UK charities are going to have the same issues that I have already come across with the removal of "tags" as they are replaced with "custom fields", and have some questions for Intuit below.
The first issue (and a legally significant one) is that existing tag data will be removed from May 2028, three years from now. As Intuit should know, it is a legal requirement in the UK that all financial information is retained for seven full financial years after the year in which the transaction happened (for regulatory oversight). Deleting the information that has been stored in tags until now will cause all UK organisations to lose data that they are legally required to keep, unless they manually copy all the existing tag data to their new custom field(s) - at a massive administrative cost. Why is it not possible to have an automated process that can perform this transfer for historic transactions if you insist on deleting the old tag data so quickly?
The second issue is that (at least on QBO Plus), the limit for tags is 300, while the new limit is 100 per custom field. Are organisations with more than 100 tags expected to use two or three of the four custom fields to replace this - which also seems messy (how can you remember which custom field has each 100 of the tags)? I also see no obvious method to replicate tag groups except by splitting tags across the custom fields (giving a maximum of only four groups, not the 40 we can currently have).
A third issue is with Gift Aid. With tags, it has been possible to add both a tag for a specific campaign/purpose and a tag for Gift Aid, to the same transaction, using just the tag field. The simple solution to this is to use one custom field just for Gift Aid, with another for the campaign/purpose tags (but this uses two of the four custom fields available for Plus users). Please note that in my case I am already using "Location" to differentiate between different fund types (Restricted, Unrestricted, etc.) and "Class" for project departments so these are not available - I then use(d) tags more for specific fundraising campaigns.
Finally, also on Gift Aid, I use bank rules to automatically record regular donations from individuals (we have hundreds of rules for these). Until now, I have been able to add the "Gift Aid" tag to transactions from donors who have a declaration in place as part of the rule, meaning these were automatically tagged as they were processed from the bank feed. For some reason, Intuit have decided not to allow custom fields to be allocated to these rules, so it is no longer possible to automatically tag transactions from donors with Gift Aid declarations. This is going to require yet more administrative expense to add manually after the event, and is likely to lead to more errors (missed transactions, costing charities more money through missed claims). Why is it not possible to add custom fields to bank rules?
It looks to me as if someone at Intuit had the idea of removing the tags functionality but didn't bother to talk to users to find out how this would affect the work they are doing and the way QBO works for them. When we moved to QBO, we were told in pre-sales that QBO supported UK charities really well, but my experience has been that I've had to use lots of workarounds that we didn't need to use in Sage 50, and a lot more external spreadsheets to do what Sage did internally. Now Intuit is making some of those workarounds unavailable, making it even harder to run a charity using QBO. Intuit - please make the necessary changes urgently so the above issues do not affect charities like ours!