Hi Matt
I hear what you're saying - I've even seen accounting softwares that go up to 30 characters! The sort of 'multi-dimensional' / tagging system seems to be the way of the future for web-based applications. I've seen it in several such as Workday, and now QuickBooks.
You can setup two groups of tags, one for department / location, and one for Event / Operations, and tag each transaction accordingly. You'd be able to run reports incorporating these tags to get the differentiated information your client is looking for.
I'm actually a giant fan of this approach since it makes things easier to read / enter for end users in the long run without remembering esoteric code structures.
