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Organise your work with tags
Tag anything a project's office doesn't already cover, discipline, team, phase, whatever you want to slice reports by, then filter and group every report by those tags.
What you'll achieve
Tag projects and people by office so any report can answer a question for one studio at a time.
You'll end up with: Two projects and one person carry office tags, and the Projects report filters and groups by office.
A tag is a label for anything a report doesn't already split by
A practice running more than one studio wants shared staff, shared clients, and a single Monument workspace so nothing gets duplicated, but also wants an answer scoped to just one slice of the business now and then, who's fully booked on the residential side, how's the fit-out team tracking this quarter. If that slice is which office a project belongs to, offices are the built-in, real answer: create Sydney Office, assign projects to it, and every report that already knows about offices can filter or group by it, no typing required. This article is about the rest of it, discipline, team, phase, whatever a firm wants to slice by that isn't already a project's office.
A tag is nothing more than a label you type onto a project or a person. Tag one project Melbourne Office and another Sydney Office, and Monument can immediately slice numbers by that label across every tagged entity: projects, tasks, time, expenses, resources, contacts, revenue and allocations, though document and rate report types don't all expose Tags. This tutorial uses an office-flavoured example because it's an easy one to follow start to finish, but treat it as a stand-in for whatever dimension your firm actually wants: the tagging itself takes about a minute either way, and everything else in this article is the reporting it unlocks.
If your firm has real offices set up, use those to split by studio, see Break reports and accounting down by office. Tags are still worth knowing for everything an office doesn't cover: which discipline a project sits in, which internal team is running it, anything you want to filter or group by that isn't a fixed property of the project.
Resist the urge to just make two workspaces
For a firm without real offices set up, the obvious fix for running two studios is two separate workspaces, one per studio. Don't do it. Separate workspaces mean duplicated people records, duplicated clients, two logins to juggle, and no way to ever see the whole firm in one place. The moment an architect in one studio picks up work in the other, that model breaks entirely.
Tags (or offices, if that's the dimension you're splitting by) solve the same problem without any of that cost, by adding a dimension on top of one shared workspace instead of splitting it: one workspace holds every project, person, and client, so firmwide numbers stay whole, and a label marks which slice a project or person belongs to, so you can pull the pieces apart whenever you actually need to. You get the combined view and the per-slice view from the exact same underlying data, and someone working across two of anything simply carries both labels.
A tag doesn't exist until the moment you type it onto something, and from then on Monument offers it as a suggestion everywhere else in the app. Melbourne Office and Sydney Office in this tutorial come into existence purely by being typed for the first time, there's no separate tag-creation step anywhere.
Tag the two projects by office
- 1
On the schedule, click the Riverside Apartments row, open its Info tab, and click Edit.
- 2
In the Tags field, type Melbourne Office and add it, then click Save.
- 3
Do the same for Harbourside Studios, this time picking Sydney Office, and Save again.
The first time you type Melbourne Office, the picker offers to create it right there. Every time after that, it's just a saved suggestion, one click, which is exactly what happens tagging Harbourside a moment later with Sydney Office.
People carry office tags too, not just projects
Offices are staffed, not just billed against, so a person needs the same office label if you want your staffing and time reports to split by studio the same way your project reports do. Priya Sharma works out of Sydney, so her profile gets the Sydney Office tag, and because that tag already exists from tagging Harbourside a moment ago, it's sitting there as a suggestion rather than something to type from scratch.
- 1
Open the Staff list and click Priya Sharma to open her profile.
- 2
Click Edit, add Sydney Office to her Tags field, and Save her profile.
Where all of this actually pays off: the Projects report
Open the Projects list, where every project is already one row, and tagging just turned that list into something you can answer office-specific questions with. A fresh Projects list doesn't show tags by default though, so the first move is making them visible: add a Tags column from the plus at the top right. Make Tags visible before grouping by it; filters are configured independently and do not require a visible table column.
With tags visible, two different tools do two different jobs. Filter narrows to one office at a time, add a filter on Tags, choose Melbourne Office, and the list drops to just the Melbourne projects, Riverside Apartments standing alone, clear it and everyone comes back. Group instead shows every office side by side: group by Tags and the list splits into bands, one per office, each with its own subtotal, and anything nobody's tagged yet collects under an honest Untagged band that doubles as a to-do list.
- 1
On the Projects list, add a Tags column from the plus menu at the top right.
- 2
Add a filter on Tags and pick Melbourne Office to narrow the list to Riverside Apartments, then clear it.
- 3
Group by Tags to split the list into Melbourne Office and Sydney Office bands, each with a subtotal.
Nothing about this is specific to the Projects report. Tags are available as a reporting dimension for tagged entities such as projects, tasks, time, expenses, resources, contacts, revenue and allocations, group a time report by Tags to see hours by office, or a resourcing view to see who in each studio is actually stretched thin, though document and rate report types don't all expose Tags.
Tags drift when more than one person is typing them
Because a tag is born the instant someone types it, a workspace with several people tagging things will eventually grow a stray one, someone types Melb where everyone else has been typing Melbourne Office, and now one office is quietly answering to two different labels. Grouping matches the exact text, so those two become two separate bands that should have been a single one.
Settings has a Tags page built specifically for this drift. It lists every tag currently in use with a count of how many items carry it, and lets you rename, merge, or remove tags already in use. Renaming Melb to Melbourne Office folds its items straight into the real band and the stray disappears. There's nothing to create here, tags only ever come from being used somewhere, this page is purely for tidying up after the fact.
Troubleshooting
- There's no tag catalogue to set up in advance. Tags come from typing them onto something, so the Settings Tags page lets you rename, merge, or remove tags already in use, but it still has no New Tag button. Create the first office tag by using it directly on a project.
- Grouping matches the exact text, nothing fuzzy about it. Melbourne Office and Melb read as two entirely different tags and will form two separate bands. If a studio ends up split across two labels, merge them on the Settings Tags page so the report reads as one office again.
- A project can carry more than one tag, and that's intentional. A joint job can belong to both offices at once. When you group by Tags, a project with two tags shows up in both bands, which means band subtotals can add up to more than the grand total. Read each band as its own answer to its own question, not as a slice that should sum to a whole.
- Show the Tags column before you try to group by it. A brand-new Projects list hides tags by default, and grouping only works from visible columns, add Tags first or the option to group by it simply won't be there.
- Filtering and grouping answer different questions. Reach for a filter when you want one studio in focus and nothing else on screen; reach for grouping when you want every studio visible side by side with its own subtotal.
Where this fits next
Tags are available as a reporting dimension for tagged entities such as projects, tasks, time, expenses, resources, contacts, revenue and allocations; document and rate report types do not all expose Tags. If the split you actually want is by office, Break reports and accounting down by office covers the built-in version of this same idea. To turn one of these filtered or grouped views into a saved, reusable table with its own columns and sorting, see Build a custom report.