Accidentally Renamed Column Headers: Re-Download Transactions?

data · February 27, 2021, 4:34pm

Hey Tiller community,

So a few weeks back, I imported a bunch of old transactions from Mint and was using filters to batch-change account names and whatnot. I didn’t realize until today that I must have accidentally overwritten a few of the column header names - namely, Account, Account #, and Institution. I’ve had the sheet set to autoupdate, so now I have about 60 transactions starting Feb 7th that were brought in that lack data for those fields.

What would be the best way to fix this? What I’d like to do is basically “re-import” all transactions starting from Feb 7th, but I couldn’t seem to find a way to do this.

Thanks for any help or ideas!

Blake · February 27, 2021, 1:52am

If you have the date, description, and amount, I bet you could fill that missing information in manually in short order. Right?

randy · February 27, 2021, 2:37am

I agree with @Blake. It’s not THAT MANY records. Just fix them up manually and you’re back in business.

You can reference this doc to make sure you have the correct headers.

data · February 27, 2021, 2:55am

Hey @Blake and @randy, thanks for the replies! True true, not many transactions, although between business and personal bank accounts, credit cards, investment accounts, venmo etc I do have quite a few accounts and it might take awhile to narrow down which transaction belongs to which. Not a herculean effort required in this case, but I guess I would be curious what the solution would be if it were 10x as many transactions?

Blake · February 27, 2021, 3:33am

If you had lots of transactions, you would need to import into Tiller the transactions from the affected accounts.

jemmoa7 · March 2, 2021, 7:36pm

Make an empty new Google sheet and link it and your accounts to Tiller. It will then download ALL transactions into a new Transactions sheet. Rename your damaged Transactions sheet to “something else” and create a new empty Transactions sheet (with the correct headers). You can copy and paste from the new Transactions and damaged Transactions until you have good data. The new Transactions sheet won’t have any category information, but if you’ve set up Autocat comprehensively, that won’t be too hard to get the categories reassigned. Autocat is an AMAZING addon. Since you only lost a limited amount of data, I’d copy and paste what category info is still good. This is what I would do.

randy · February 27, 2021, 4:27pm

I agree with @jemmoa7’s approach: create & link a new spreadsheet, make sure the column headers & accounts match across the two spreadsheets, update your feeds, then manually copy/paste the batches of transactions that are new. It’s a fussy process but fortunately only necessary if you mess up your spreadsheet.

data · March 2, 2021, 3:21am

Great idea @jemmoa7. I ended up creating and linking a new Tiller foundation template sheet, copying and pasting the headers from my existing sheet, and populating it. Then I selected the transactions from the affected date range and copied and pasted back over. Good solve!