Bills category is adding a negative value instead of subtracting a negative value

Google Sheets
1

I’m using the Monthly Budget tab that pulls Expenses/Income from the Categories tab.

For the month of April, everything is fine. I had a budget of $500 and expenses of $475 with a surplus of $25. For May, instead of subtracting the expenses, it added them for a total of $975. Can anyone elaborate on why this might be happening?

2

Hi @sneakernet,

The only reasons I can think of are because of an incorrect polarity on the Transactions sheet, meaning that the transactions you categorized using expense categories were positive amounts.

Are you using the Foundation template - the one that has the month columns in the Categories sheet?

If so, you can also reach out for more help from our support team and we’ll be better able to diagnose the issue from there.

Heather

3

Hi @heather,

I’ve come across the same problem in Tiller recently. Some of my expenses are showing up as positive values on the Transactions tab, while they are most definitely cash outflows (mortgage, for example). I use the Foundations template. To sum it up:

  • Transaction Tab shows a positive expense value
  • Monthly Budget, ‘Actual’ column shows a negative expense value
  • Monthly Budget, ‘Available’ column shows the sum of my ‘Actual’ - ‘Available’. Since ‘Actual’ is a negative number, it actually adds them together when it should be reducing by this amount

I have not refreshed this spreadsheet with Tiller for around 5-6 months, so not sure if that is part of the issue. It was working fine back in October 2021 when I last updated it.

Any thoughts on how to address this?