🏆 Budget Plan - Excel

Microsoft Excel Show & Tell
62

I do keep getting an error message saying “there are one or more circular references” in my cells — is that normal?

63

No, that’s a problem. Find which cell is reporting the error, something must have gotten changed as it shouldn’t have any circular references by default.

64

Okay, thanks. I think I fixed that circular reference problem — I just reinput the formula and it seems like it solved it. I couldn’t find how to determine which cell was reporting it.

But my original problem still remains. Sorry for the trouble, but do you have any other ideas what might be causing this breakdown?

65

Do the proper values show up for each month on the Budget Plan sheet?
Is your Budget Plan sheet named “Budget Plan”? If the name is different, then the formula you paste into Categories must change to reflect the different name.
If you want to send me a direct message with a download link, I’d be willing to troubleshoot it and see where the issue is.

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66

Hi Joseph, thanks so much for your responses and for that generous offer — I think we may have figured it out? My partner took a look and changed the formula to this (below) and now it’s working. Does that present any issues for the spreadsheet that I’m not foreseeing?

=IF(ISBLANK($A2),“”,IFERROR(SUMIF(‘Budget Plan 2024’!$E$4:$E$199,$A2,‘Budget Plan 2024’!M$4:M$199),0))

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67

Seems that should be OK, most of that code was to find the date since we can’t assume everyone’s template is the same, but if you’re directly telling it where to get the date, that takes care of the issue.

68

This is a fantastic tool–nice work, and thanks for sharing!

Quick question–is the ExternalSource frequency working with the latest version of Excel? By typing the 2-row / 12-column formula in the Notes field, Excel is returning it as an array of the same size within that Notes cell. That creates a REF error inside the Indirect() portion of the monthly formula, and also spilling errors if something is in notes in the below row.

69

Woops, try without the ‘=’, I think you want something like this:
Utilities!AF4:AQ5
I just took the ‘=’ out of the documentation.

70

I found the solution after some testing, it needs to be like this below. It needs the equals, and the entire range reference also needs to be inside double quotes to force Indirect to recognize it as a text string. Note there’s also the single quote to indicate the start of the sheet name.

=“‘Sheet Name’!A1:L2”

71

I updated the documentation to show that format. Thanks!

72

OMG I Love this. You are awesome. Thank you for your hard work and sharing this with us.

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73

I love this! Thank you so much!! It addresses challenges I have had with budgeting for years - you thought of everything! :heartpulse:

One small thing - the enable/disable doesn’t work when the frequency is set to ‘Annually’. It isn’t a huge problem I set frequency to ‘Monthly’ and mult to 12 - and that worked fine.

Just thought that you would want to know.
AND($H97=“Annually”,MONTH(M$3)=IF(ISBLANK($F97),MONTH($M$3),MONTH($F97))),IF(MOD(DATEDIF(IF(ISBLANK($F97),EOMONTH($M$3,-1)+1,$F97),EOMONTH(M$3,0),“Y”),IF(ISBLANK($I97),1,$I97))>0,“-”,$L97),

74

Sure enough, I missed that one. I just updated the shared template so Annually also respects the enable/disable option, and updated the version number to 1.72. Thanks for pointing it out and glad you are enjoying the template!

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75

Thank you very much. Just getting started but really like the past-category option so that I can understand what my actual income/expenses were. Previously I would look at the summarized annual trends and determine how to spread the costs and work within a practical limit. Love it.
Thank you
Dan

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76

Hello @jpfieber. I have a hopefully quick question.
I have downloaded multiple other community solutions, some that require the categories sheet for their template to work.

I had originally downloaded the Budget Plan Template, but didn’t have time to finish following the instructions. In your instructions, you are changing the Categories Sheet formulas.

My Question Is:
By following your instructions and changing the categories sheet formulas, will the other community templates still work?

Thanks

77

It depends what they do. If they try to change the monthly amounts, then yes, that would be a conflict and they won’t work together (eg. Savings Budget has a feature that makes a change to the monthly budget, so that feature and Budget Plan can’t be used at the same time). If the template just references the data on the Categories sheet, then there isn’t a problem. That Savings Budget feature is the only conflict I’m aware of.

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78

Wonderful. Thank you for the reply and the hard work that you do for us!

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79

Hi @jpfieber, thanks for building out this tool! I’m relatively new to Tiller, and I have what might be a silly question. I like to split my annual expenses out into a monthly budget amount, then pay them when the annual bill is due. (For example, we spend $120 per year on ESPN Plus, so I include $10 per month in my budget toward that subscription.)

When I pay that amount to ESPN Plus, Tiller says I’m over budget by $110 dollars (because I’ve spent $120 and technically only budgeted $10). Is there a way for Tiller to recognize that I’ve already put that money aside, or do I just have to ignore that “over-budget” indicator?

80

If you were on Google Sheets I’d recommend the Savings Budget template, which allows you to carry over funds from one month to the next when they aren’t used, so you can build up that pool of money that you eventually spend. I don’t think there is an equivalent available on Excel currently, so you’d probably just need to ignore the warning, unless others have a better way of handling that.

81

Thanks for the quick response - I will just have to ignore the warning for now unless I can find another workaround. Your budget plan tool is phenomenal for keeping track of all those annual expenses that I spread over the year!