Teams and tags — how to organize work and costs
A common question when setting Taia up: we publish four different things, should each one be its own team?
Usually not. Teams and tags answer different questions, and reaching for a team when you wanted a tag leaves you managing people you never needed to separate.
The rule
Split into teams where billing splits. Use tags to break work down inside a team.
If two departments pay from different budgets and each wants its own invoice, they are two teams. If they come out of the same budget and you only want to see how the spend divides, they are one team with two tags.
Teams: the billing and access boundary
A team is a real boundary. It controls:
- Billing. A team sits under a billing account, which is what gets charged and invoiced.
- Access. Team members see their team's projects and its shared glossaries, TMs and style guides.
- Reporting. Organization reports can be grouped by team, so you get per-team totals with no extra setup.
That makes a team the right unit when the split is structural: separate budgets, separate invoices, or people who genuinely should not see each other's work.
One team for everyone is completely fine when none of that applies. Most organizations need fewer teams than they first assume.
A project belongs to whichever team was active in the sidebar when it was created, and there's no self-serve way to move it afterwards. See choose which team a new project belongs to.
Tags: the lightweight breakdown
A tag is a label you put on a project. Nothing more, and that is the appeal — creating one costs nothing and getting one wrong costs nothing.
Tag by whatever distinction you actually care about: the publication, the document type, the campaign, the quarter.
To tag a project: open your Projects list and click Add tags on the project (it reads "2 tags" and so on once some are applied). Type in Search or create tag… to find an existing tag or create a new one, tick the ones you want, and click Apply. Each tag carries a colour so they're easy to scan down the list, and a project can have as many as you like.
To filter by tag: open the filter panel on the Projects list and select one or more tags. You get every project carrying them.
This is the tool for "show me everything we did for the quarterly newsletter" when the newsletter is not, and should not be, its own team.
Where the money shows up
Cost reporting lives in Manage Organization → Reports. It lists every project with its jobs, tasks, word counts and totals over a time range you choose (this month, last month, this quarter, this year, all time, or custom dates), and exports to XLSX.
Group by offers three options: None, User, and Team.
That is the detail worth knowing before you design your structure. Reports break costs down by team and by person. They do not group or filter by tag — tags organize the Projects list, not the financial report. So:
- If you need a cost total that stands on its own, that distinction has to be a team.
- If you need to find and review a body of work, a tag does the job and costs you nothing.
If you want spend along a tag you've already applied, export the report to XLSX and group it there against your tagged project list.
Putting it together
| You want to… | Use |
|---|---|
| Bill two departments separately | Separate teams |
| Stop one group seeing another's projects | Separate teams |
| See spend per department in Reports | Separate teams |
| Track four publications inside one budget | One team, four tags |
| Find every project of a given type | Tags |
| Sort out a naming mess later | Tags — they're free to change |
Start with the smallest number of teams your billing and access actually require, and use tags for everything else. Adding a team later is easy. Unpicking people from teams they never needed is not.