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Using Nested Tags to Build a Hierarchy

Essal Office supports nested tags — a parent-child relationship between tags that lets you create a tree-like structure for your classification system. This is useful when you have a large number of tags and want to group related ones under a common parent.

What Nested Tags Provide

Without nesting, a flat list of tags like Finance — Invoices, Finance — Receipts, and Finance — Bank Statements all appear alongside hundreds of other unrelated tags. With nesting, you can create a Finance parent tag and make Invoices, Receipts, and Bank Statements its children. This allows you to:

  • Filter to all finance documents by selecting the parent Finance tag
  • Filter to a specific sub-type by selecting a child tag like Invoices
  • Keep the tag list organized into logical groups

Tag Hierarchy Rules

  • Rule: **Maximum depth**
  • Details: Tags can be nested up to 5 levels deep


  • Rule: **One parent per tag**
  • Details: Each tag can have at most one parent


  • Rule: **Parent auto-assignment**
  • Details: When you add a child tag to a document, all its parent tags are added automatically


  • Rule: **Child auto-removal**
  • Details: When you remove a parent tag from a document, all child tags under it are also removed


  • Rule: **Retroactive updates**
  • Details: Assigning a parent to an existing tag automatically adds the parent tag to all documents that currently have that tag

Creating a Nested Tag

To set a parent for a tag:

  1. Go to Manage → Tags
  2. Open the tag you want to make a child (e.g. Invoices)
  3. In the Parent field, select the tag you want as its parent (e.g. Finance)
  4. Save

The tag now appears indented under its parent in the tag list and sidebar.

Example: A Finance Tag Hierarchy

Finance ├── Invoices │ ├── Supplier Invoices │ └── Client Invoices ├── Receipts └── Bank Statements

If you tag a document with Supplier Invoices, Essal Office automatically also assigns Invoices and Finance. If someone later removes the Finance tag, Invoices and Supplier Invoices are removed at the same time.

When to Use Nesting vs. Flat Tags

Nested tags are most valuable when:

  • You have more than 20–30 tags and navigation is getting unwieldy
  • You want to be able to filter at both a broad and narrow level
  • You have clear category/sub-category relationships in your document types

For simpler archives with a small number of tags, flat tags are easier to manage and just as effective.

Filtering by a Parent Tag

When you filter the document list by a parent tag (e.g. Finance), the results include all documents tagged with Finance or any of its children. You don't need to select each child tag individually.