Cash Flow Forecast issue with multiple overrides to a single category

Hello! Thank you for the development of these very helpful sheets!

I’ve noticed something that does not appear to work as I expected, when I attempt to apply more than one override to a matched category in the Cash Flow Forecast.

What appears to be happening is that each individual override is computed as an offset to the current budget. This works fine for the initial time a category gets overridden, but it is (possibly) incorrect for subsequent overrides.

This is fairly simple to recreate. I’m being told I can’t include URLs or uploads in my posts (likely due to being a new account?) so I’ve put a screenshot at the following location: http colon slash slash reedtaylor dot com slash tiller1.png

By my understanding there should be no “uptick” in cashflow 2035 as the example expense category should have already been at zero, having been moved there by the end of the first override. Instead the 2035+ cashflow is being shifted upwards by 96k, which is/was the full original amount of the matched category budget.

This limitation means that a single change like [budgeted amount] → [override amount] → zero can be applied once to any given category, but any sequential or overlapping such overrides will have likely unexpected effects.

To be clear, this limitation is not too challenging to work-around. It does mean, though, that the two sequential adjustments to “Mortgage” shown in the tutorial post about this solution would not work as expected. So my guess is it’s more likely a bug than a known limitation.

Hi @reed ,
Thanks for alerting us to this. We will look into it.

Hi @reed ,
We found a bug that was likely causing the multiple overrides to a single category to give incorrect results.

We’ve updated the version to 0.92.

Can you try updating your Cash Flow Forecast sheet using the Tiller Money Labs add-on and see what happens.

One other requirement is you must have a start year AND end year for a Life Event. If you don’t include the end year, it might give wrong results. Your example included a missing end year.

I’ll update the main help doc to include that start and end years are required.

Let us know if this solves the issue for you.

Thanks,
Jon

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Yes, I can confirm that the update solves the issue! Thanks for the help!

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