The out-of-the-box experience for Tiller Money optimizes for a lot of things, but some of the things it does not optimize for are minimalism and long-term performance.
The default templates - and many of the additional ones available in the community - rely on large numbers of complicated formulas that are known to cause performance problems (sluggish sheets, long fill processes, and in extreme circumstances update timeouts and duplicate records).
If you’re someone who wants to look at their data 35 different ways in real-time using the templates Tiller Money has available, this post is not for you.
For those of us with custom workflows or who just want to track our spending, thankfully much of the clutter can be eliminated. This is how I easily take a Foundation Template from Start to Simple.
Removing excess sheets
When we first start with a Foundation Template, there are a number of formula-heavy dashboard-like sheets pre-installed. For our purposes, as a rule of thumb, we want to get rid of any sheets that have large hidden sections with configuration cells like the one illustrated above.
We’ll end up keeping three sheets: Transactions, Balance History and parts of Categories.
As of now (25MAR20201), this means removing Insights, Accounts, Balances, Monthly Budget, Yearly Budget and any informational sheets you no longer want (eg. “Help”).
Both Transactions and Balance History sheets are “feeds” that are updated by the add-on. You can technically get rid of Categories if you like, as well, but the parts we keep don’t cause any problems.
Clean up the Categories sheet
The next step is to remove the excess columns from the Categories sheet.
You can get rid of Group and Type as well.
Category is used for Data Validation of the Category column in the Transactions sheet. If you are fine foregoing the data validation, you can eliminate the Categories sheet altogether!
Track your money with confidence
This is about as clean and performant as you can get and makes a wonderful starting point!
From here, you can usually build out custom views that you want of your data with far more performant sheets than those that are provided out of the box.
-Brasten