I am new to Tiller and just started implementing & customizing my Foundation Template workbook. I’ve also included transactions from retirement & savings accounts in my implementation.
As I’m categorizing all of my transactions from each account, I’m unsure how to best handle transactions that come through from these accounts. Should I just auto-cat them as transfers so they are ignored in budget or should I create new categories & group for these types of transactions.
I found this article helpful to clarify https://help.tillerhq.com/en/articles/432687-using-the-transfer-category
I am still unsure how to best categorize money I transfer to savings & retirement accounts from checking though. Will this cause issues with my net cash flow summary if I am hiding the deposits into the savings/retirement accounts but categorizing those withdrawals(transfers) from checking account so they show up in my monthly budget? In short, it would be nice to keep track of Debt/Savings as part of my monthly budget but still unclear about how this will affect the workflow under the hood.
The solution that I have decided to use for something similar is to track my transfers to my savings accounts as part of my savings goal with a new transaction.
I go to the Transactions sheet and create a new transactions by creating a new row and filling out all the details. I assign this transaction as payment to my savings category. This shows in my Monthly Budget as having paid this money to savings and takes it “off the table” for spending and as part of the income to be budgeted. Since the transfer from my checking to my savings essentially negate themselves, this is the solution I use for tracking the money and removing it from my spending money showing in the budget.
If I need to transfer money from savings for an emergancy, I simply go back and edit this initial transaction and change the amount, i.e. I dip into my savings and take out $100 of the $500 I transferred. I edit the transaction from ‘-500’ to ‘-400’.
Thanks for sharing! I’m not sure I exactly follow though, can you provide a screenshot or gif to clarify?
I guess I’m wondering if it matters/necessary to go back and edit the transaction if/when I need to take out money from the savings account in the future? As long as I can specify how much money from my income I allocate to savings/debt/retirment monthly I should be satisfied. It’s helpful to see if I’m close to the 50/30/20 ratio each month under the monthly budget tab (see screenshot above). Why do you do the additional step of editing the original transaction?
Your steps are correct. I have a specific category called ‘Saving for the move’ that’s an expense. I create a new transactions and then assign it to the category ‘Savings for move’ when I send money to the my savings account.
The reason why I go back and edit the transaction is I want to know how much I actually sent. If I withdraw 100$ from my savings that was recorded in these transactions, I need to represent that somewhere. The two ways to represent that would be to create specific transaction to show that I pulled out the 100$, or edit the existing transaction. Editing the existing transaction was easiest to do.
If I didn’t edit these transactions, it would show that I “spent” more than I actually did on this savings category. This would make it so that the rest of the budgeting is off as I’ve spent more than I did on this and don’t have the funds to allocate elsewhere.
I use the monthyl budget solution and do a 0 sum budgeting approach where all of my income is budgeted out to the different categories. If I didn’t edit this amount, I would show that my ‘actual expenses’ were more than my budgeted income. If you’re not zero sum budgeting, it may not neccessarily make a difference to you as it would only show that you spent more than you actually did. on the savings category.
I hope this helps further!
I’ll explore this further soon & let you know if I have any other questions/concerns. I plan to create a workbook using the budget template after I have the foundation template set up to my liking. I plan to use the rollover feature in the monthly budget so I’ll most likely need to follow the extra steps you mention above . Thanks for the clarification!
Hi @keenan.burkepitts, just a heads up, the rollover features are not available in the Tiller Foundation template. You’d need to use the Tiller Budget. Steps are here:
You can review a comparison of the two here.
Thanks! This article also helped to clarify: https://help.tillerhq.com/en/articles/1889362-setting-and-tracking-savings-goals
Im confused. Why would you want your savings to show as spent? Are you using the Savings Budget Template?
