On a recent trip, I hadn’t bothered to use tags to identify my expenses related to that specific trip. And I wasn’t intending to. All my trip expenses were recorded under the category of international travel, so I could easily list my trip expenses. If I were taking multiple trips per year, then it would be hard to keep the trips separate. In my case, however, the previous time I had traveled internationally was in 2023. As a result, it’s easy to know which expenses were for which trip. If an expense was in 2023, it was for the trip then. If the expense was in 2025, it was for the trip this year.
Another reason for not using tags was that it takes longer to enter a transaction. That is, it’s an extra step to add the tag to each transaction. As I was on a trip, I had higher priorities for my time.
However, after my return, I decided that it would be wise to add some tags. Yes, right now my system with not using tags works, but what happens several years down the road? How easy is it going to be to identify trips. Therefore, for the sake of “future me,” I decided to add the tags.
The good news is that for me it was definitely easier to add the tags after the trip, as opposed to during the trip. In fact, this will be my plan for all future trips. Here’s what I did:
First, I narrowed the transactions to those with the international travel category. In Emacs ledger mode, this is done with C-c C-f.
Then, as I was seeing only international travel expenses, I pasted a tag into each transaction.
Well, almost each transaction. I noted a few items that were related to international travel but not specific to a trip. For example, I needed to renew my passport before the trip. That expense is definitely for international travel, but it wasn’t specific to this trip. At least I hope that I will be using the passport for future trips. Based on that hope, I decided that the passport expense was an international travel expense but not one specific to my 2025 trip. So no tag for the passport renewal expense.
The only thing remaining was to put the information in printed form for sharing with my wife. This was a matter of exporting a query in csv format then opening the file in a spreadsheet. Clean up the formatting, send to the printer, share with spouse, and all was done.