In the cash flow forecast sheet, I noticed that in the hidden columns, “unadjusted expenses” are listed as positive numbers, but “live events expenses” (appears to be a typo) are listed as negative numbers. Is this intentional? Or did I enter things incorrectly?
Also, just as a usability thing, I noticed that when the hidden columns are collapsed, it’s tempting to re-order the “life events” entries for better organization. But that this also reorders the hidden columns and messes everything up. Not sure if there’s a way to decouple those columns from the life events columns, or protect them against reordering, but it was a bit of a head scratcher for me until I figured out what was going on.
Since the sheet was created several years ago, I can’t remember exactly why I made the Unadjusted Expenses positive and the Live Event Expenses negative.
On many Tiller sheets, we display the expenses as a positive number, so I think that’s why the Unadjusted Expenses column is positive. I can’t remember why I didn’t do that in the other expense column, but since the formulas handle it correctly, it should cause any calculation problems.
The formulas used on those columns correctly deduct the expenses for both in the Yearly Cash Flow column. The formula in U2 includes MINUS R2::R (the unadjusted expenses, which are positive expenses) and PLUS T2:T (the Live Events Expenses which are negative).
Re-ordering the Live Event rows could cause problems due to the hidden parts of the sheet. I can understand why you might want to do this, but it would be better to paste and copy here rather than re-order.
We try to make sheets as usable as possible and some Tiller sheets can handle re-ordering rows and columns, but some can break. If you see formulas in the hidden parts of rows you are thinking about re-ordering, I would recommend against doing so. When formulas can be written using ARRAYFORMULA()s in the top row to automatically generate the rest of the column, changing rows is possible. That wasn’t the case here.
Great, thanks for the clarification. The numbers seemed to work out, so I just wanted to double check that this was the convention assumed by your formulas. As for the re-ordering, yeah, I’ll just have to be careful with that. There’s always the “undo” button.
Thanks for the great sheet, this is really giving me an unprecedented level of control and accuracy over my retirement planning.