šŸ† Budget Plan - Excel

Be sure that Budget Plan M3 is a formula looking at your Categories sheet to get the month. In your Categories sheet, maybe recopy the formula to all your budget cells, making sure to update DATEVALUE(F$1) if your January column isnā€™t F.

Per the screenshot, I change the Formula to E1 and it works, but I get the displayed error.


SORRY - This shows the error and formula :frowning:

Thatā€™s just pointing out that the formula doesnā€™t match the one in the other rows. Keep in mind that after you change one of the formulas (ideally you start with E2), you need to use the fill handle to copy it across all columns, then down all rows since each cell has an individual formula in it.

That was it and thanks so much!!

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Amazing sheet! It allowed me to completely put together my 2023 budget, before 2023! Iā€™ve never done that before. Thank you! One modification I made which others may find useful, is I added a conditional formatting on the monthly schedule columns M-X, which turns bright red any negative numbers. I found that I sometimes had a transaction categorized incorrectly into an expense category rather than a transfer category, which throws off the ā€œpast categoryā€ frequency. I also did the same thing for the totals in M1-X1 to call out any months with <$0 money left in the budget. Thanks again for this!

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Great tip! That really helps catch the potential mis-categorizations. Super easy to implement.

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Hello, This is a great worksheet, thank you for all the time you have put in it. I have a question about how the frequency works. When I select ā€œPast-Category-AVG-Yearā€ does it average the last calendar year or is it a moving target like the past 12 months? Example It is March so the average would be March 2022 thru March 2023.

If youā€™re budgeting for March of this year, and choose the frequency of ā€œPast-Categoryā€ it will base your budget on the transactions from March of last year. AVG Year is based on the 12 months prior to the start of your budget period (if you start on 1/1/23, last year would be 1/1/22-12/31/22).

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Hello-I am new to Tiller-this is a great addition! I am using the Excel version. I have a question that I did not see covered in the thread. I have a couple of categories where I pay one amount in one month and then different amounts in 2 or 3 other months. Will I need to make separate lines in the budget for all of these different amounts?
Thanks in advance!

Youā€™d either have to create multiple entries (easier), or use the ā€œExternalSourceā€ frequency and then have the values entered or calculated on another sheet (harder).

Thank you. That was what I thought, just wanted to make sure I didnā€™t miss something.

Hi again-
Quick question. In the Budget plan-can I set the formulas to roll-over remaining actual spend into the next monthā€™s budget?
i.e.: Straight line monthly gating for groceries of $200/mo
In Sept spent 150, budget in Oct would update to $250
I am pretty certain I could write a basic formula to do this, but would it break the current formulas in the Budget Plan tool or others that you can think of? Nervous to hard code in the months on the Budget Plan worksheet.

Is there a better way for me to track this?

Thanks in advance!
Kymm

No, Budget Plan doesnā€™t/canā€™t do that as it isnā€™t aware of your spending. Think of it as a turbo-charged extension of your Categories sheet. To do what you want, you could use the ā€œSavings Budgetā€ solution, which is similar to ā€œMonthly Budgetā€, but adds the ability to roll money forward and/or transfer it to different categories.

Edit: Woops, just noticed this is the Excel version, donā€™t think Savings Budget is available for Excel yet, so not sure if there is a good solution yet for what you want to do.

As @jpfieber notes, @kbrown, we havenā€™t ported the Savings Budget to Excel yet. One unique challenge it presents is that it is integrated with add-on scriptsā€¦ and we are hesitant to break the seal on template-script integrations in the Excel add-in.

The roll-forward behavior you suggest would be really easy to implement with scripts or a side-bar workflow, but may be challenging with formulasā€¦ but it sounds like the point is moot given the platform issue.

Hi there, I think I must be making a basic mistake (Iā€™m pretty rusty with Excel and very new to Tiller) but Iā€™m filling out my Budget Plan for 2024 and itā€™s not auto-populating in my categories sheet. Iā€™ve pasted the formula into my January column and changed the formula to reflect my actual column. I think Iā€™m changing the dates correctly, but perhaps not? Including a couple screenshots in case thatā€™s helpfulā€¦ again, this is probably basic, Iā€™m confused about how the Tiller spreadsheet ā€œknowsā€ Iā€™m creating a new year and how it refers to it 2024 in all the various sheets.

The dates look correct in the screenshot. Did you copy that formula to all the other green cells in the Categories sheet? Did you add some budget items in the Budget Plan sheet?

Thanks for replying ā€” I did, yes. Hereā€™s a little snapshot of thatā€¦ I entered the date for 1/1/2024 in M3 as wellā€¦ is that correct?

I think it should be 1/1/24
If that doesnā€™t work, try putting the formula back that looks at your category sheet to see if that works:

=DATE(
   RIGHT(
      INDIRECT("'Categories'!"&ADDRESS(1,MATCH("??? 202?",'Categories'!1:1,0))),
      4
   ),
   MONTH(
      DATEVALUE(
         LEFT(
            INDIRECT("'Categories'!"&ADDRESS(1,MATCH("??? 202?",'Categories'!1:1,0))),
            3
         )&"1"
      )
   ),1
)

Okay, thanks, I tried putting that formula into the M3 cell ā€” it changed the sheet to Sept 2023 - Dec 2024 (which almost matches my Category sheet, which starts in Oct 2023 - December 2024). But still no budget items populating in my Categories. So I changed it back to 1/1/24, and now itā€™s reflecting what Iā€™d like it to reflect (just the 2024 year), but the budget items arenā€™t auto-populating in Categories.

Maybe I could redownload everything and start over in case I just accidentally deleted a random cell that makes everything agree ā€” I havenā€™t gotten very far, just categorized all my transactions, but I could copy/paste all my transactions as values into a new sheet, right?