Tags

Define the tags spend is grouped by, from tags people put on their keys to tags Dispatch applies automatically by reading each conversation

A key's label belongs to the person who made it and can say whatever they like. That makes labels useless for answering "what did the platform team spend?" or "how much went on work for Acme?". Tags are a vocabulary you define once, so spend can be grouped consistently. Anyone in the organization can put a tag on their key, but only a Dispatch Admin can define one.

Tags are defined on the Tags tab of the Organization page and reported on in Cost Reporting.

Spend by customer, without asking anyone: Create a tag called "Customer" with the values AcmeCorp, Globex and Initech, and describe how to tell them apart, such as "repositories named acme-*". Dispatch reads each conversation and picks the matching customer. At the end of the month, a report grouped by Customer adds up to your whole bill.

Three Ways a Tag Gets Applied

When you create a tag, you decide one thing: How it gets applied.

Option	How it works	Good for
You put it on keys	Every request from a key carrying the tag carries it too.	Teams, business units, cost centres, anything that's true of the key itself
Automatic — yes or no	Dispatch reads each conversation and decides whether this tag fits.	One kind of work across many keys, such as incidents or customer-reported bugs
Automatic — one of several values	Dispatch reads each conversation and picks the closest value, or none of them.	One question with several answers, such as which customer or which project

Creating a Tag

Click New tag, name it, and choose How it gets applied. The other fields depend on that choice:

Field	Shown for	What to enter
Name	All tags	Required. For a tag with several values, name the thing being decided, not one of its values: Customer, Business unit, Project. Reports read it as "by customer".
Business unit	Yes-or-no and key tags	Optional. Who pays, if that's different from the name.
Description	Yes-or-no and key tags	Optional. Helps whoever is choosing tags for a key.
When it applies	Automatic — yes or no	Required. What Dispatch decides by. Write it for a stranger: which repositories, which kinds of request, whose work.
How to choose	Automatic — one of several values	Required. What to look at in a conversation to tell the values apart.
Values	Automatic — one of several values	Each value needs a name and a description Dispatch can recognise it by. Use Add value for more.

Click Create tag.

For a tag with several values, at most one value lands on any request, so a report grouped by that tag adds up to your whole bill. When none of the values fits, Dispatch picks none, and that spend shows as Unclassified.

Editing, Archiving and Restoring

• Rename freely. Renaming is safe, because reports group by the tag, not by its name.

• Switching kinds is limited. A key tag and a yes-or-no tag can be switched between each other. A tag with several values stays one; to change its kind, create a new tag. If you switch a key tag to yes-or-no while keys carry it, Dispatch warns you that from then on it lands only where Dispatch decides it fits.

• Archive instead of deleting. Click the archive icon. The confirmation says how many keys the tag comes off. Archiving removes the tag from every key immediately, and no new spend is counted under it, but spend already recorded keeps the tag's name in reports. Removing a value from a tag with several values archives that value the same way.

• Restore from the archive. Below the list, click Show followed by the number of archived tags (for example, Show 2 archived tags), then click Restore on the one you want. Archived tags keep their names reserved, so restore one rather than creating it again.

Exporting and Importing a Tag

Each tag has Export and Import buttons, so you can edit a tag as a file, which is handy for a tag with many values.

• Export downloads the tag, and its values if it has them, as a JSON file. Which keys carry the tag isn't included.

• Import reads a file back into that same tag. Dispatch checks it first and shows a preview, marking each entry New, Changed, Unchanged or Skipped. Nothing is written until you click Import with the number of changes. The tag keeps its identity, so reports keep grouping the same way. Other tags are left alone, and a value that's missing from the file is left in place rather than archived.

Putting Tags on Keys

Tags are applied on the API Keys page, not here:

• Anyone can click Add or Edit in a key's Tags column to choose tags for that key. This applies to that key only, not the owner's other keys.

• Dispatch Admins can tick several keys and use Add tag or Remove tag to change them all at once.

• Guardrails can put tags on every key their people own. Those tags show as inherited and can only be removed by changing the guardrail. See Guardrails.

A key can carry up to 10 tags and up to 5 tags with several values. Tags with several values appear in a different colour on the key, so you can tell which ones Dispatch fills in per conversation.

Using Tags in Cost Reporting

In Cost Reporting, group a report by Tag to see spend by your key tags and yes-or-no tags. Each tag with several values is also available as its own grouping under its name, such as Customer. A report can group by one tag with several values at a time.

Two rows can appear that aren't tags:

Row	Meaning
Untagged	The key carried no tags
Unclassified	Dispatch looked at the conversation and none of a tag's values fit

Keep key tags few. A key with several tags counts its whole spend under each of them, so a grouped report can add up to more than your bill. Tags with several values don't have this problem, because only one value lands on a request.

Next Steps

Goal	Documentation
Report on spend by tag	Cost Reporting
Put tags on your keys	API Keys
Tag everyone under a policy automatically	Guardrails