I solved this a while back by doing the following:
Create a column called “Sort” in the Categories sheet. It happens to sit to the right of the “Type” column in mine.
Number each Category line item from 1-99.
Income Categories use distinct numbers. We have eight income categories from 1-7 (I track distinct income categories maybe more so than others. Example: My Income, Wife’s Income, My Bonus, Wife’s Bonus, My Side Gig, Other, Refunds.
Expense Categories are all given 9.
Transfer Categories are all given 99.
You then use Data>Sort Range>Advanced Range Sorting Options and your first column you sort on is the “Sort” column in Ascending order. From there you sort by Group, then by Category to account for alphabetizing Groups and Categories within all of the 9s and 99s.
Viola, you now have Income always listed at top before expenses.
Add same Sort column to Budget Plan and you can now sort there as well.
I built a very rudimentary version of the same concept a few years ago, but I’m switching to this for 2023!! This is an insane improvement upon the thing I hacked together. Thank you so much
With the way the current sheet is laid out, I don’t see a way of doing this. Fortunately, I’ve been working on a new way of handling the ‘back end’ of things that will make this possible (just tested sorting by Importance and it works). Still a little testing and tweaking to do, but should be available soon.
@jpfieber the one recommendation I would add to this sheet is a way to link each Budget Plan entry to an individual transactions so we can make more granular category breakdowns. Maybe a tagging system? Or, we can just update the descriptions of the transactions to match the ones in the budget plan.
For Jan 2023 I am not having the data communicating from the budget plan to monthly budget. I’ve checked everything I could as far as accidentally changing a formula but cannot find anything. Does anyone know which area I should be checking? Spreadsheet novice here
Monthly Budget gets it’s data from the Categories sheet. Part of the setup for Budget Plan is to modify the Categories sheet to include a formula that pulls in data from the Budget Plan sheet. Check your Categories sheet to see if the formula in there as described in the first post of this discussion.
Using Google Sheets - I have loaded the Budget Plan, copied the long formula to the Category Sheet pulled cell 1 to all the other cells. The problem is in the last column, Dec 23; it populates with all 0’s. I checked the cells and they have what looks to me like the the proper formula. This was working yesterday but is failing now. Any advice on where to look for the problem?
Hal
Make sure that the ‘E’ in the formula is your January column. If your January column is a different column letter, change the E in the formula to the letter of your January column. Then copy it across all the columns and then rows.
Thanks - I needed this tip on how to get the sorting to work because every time I tried to sort the whole sheet it would get stuck in a calculating loop somehow and error out.
This template worked really well for me. I found myself using Past-Category/Past-Category-AVG a lot to start setting a budget for 2023 and then in some cases changing to Monthly/Annually/Annually-AVG-Year when I wanted to tweak budget lines or break things up into different categories. It’s only my second year using Tiller so I’m still adjusting how I set things up but I’m super grateful for the Budget Plan!
Hello Joe, I am sorry to bother you, I know you have been very busy answering all of our end-of-year, first-of-year questions…I need your help if possible?.. in the Budget Plan I would like to manually key-in amounts for the 12 months of my utilities, since they fluctuate approximately 3 periods throughout the year, however it doesn’t look like that is possible, am I missing something? Also, I have tried to use the external source option and I am pretty sure I am following your example correctly but it is not pulling in the numbers, what am I doing wrong. Thanks for all your help!
Since it would require entering different amounts for each month, you’d either have to create 12 different budget items, each with different start/end dates, or you could use ExternalSource. To do that, create a new sheet and name it Utilities. In the first row, put 1/1/23 in the first cell, 2/1/23 in the second, and so on. Then below each month header, put the amount you want to budget for that month. In Budget Plan, create a new budget item and set the frequency to ExternalSource. In the Notes column for that item, type: Utilities!$A$1:$L$2
Budget Plan should look to that range and pull in the values for each month that you typed in.
I’ll be releasing a template soon that I use to manage my utilities, that may be another option for you, but good to start with exactly what you need. Hope this works for you!
I have a subscription for AT&T Sunday Football. My bill is split up into 4 payments from lets say Sep to Dec every year. How do I set this budget as well as other similar ones up for future proofing? Currently I have it set up as SpreadOverPeriod end I input the starting date and the end date. The issue is that it doesnt automatically update upon the start of the next year unless I manually change the dates from 2022 to 2023 with the same months of course. I am sure there is a way to set up a budget like this for multi year usage.
If it’s me, I would just update the start and end date each year to just include those 4 months. If you want to have the same entry work over multiple years, I think you’d have to setup 4 annual payments with a start date set for each month but no end date. I think that will work but can’t guarantee (haven’t tried budget items with dates carrying over years).
Hello.
I am brand new to tiller and in my playing around, I found this template (add-on?)
I have followed the install instructions but I am not sure what is supposed to happen. The Budget Plan values per month are supposed to transpose to the Categories values per month? Categories are still showing 0.00 despite Budget Plan entries and marking certain Transactions as that category.
