I have a question about the Cash Flow Forecast template from Tiller Money Labs. The incomes I put under “Life Events” are not applied to my forecast. Please help thanks!
Hi @roger.chu91 ,
Did you add or delete any rows or columns to your sheet?
Or put any data in the white cells? Only green background cells should be editable.
I’m unable to duplicate what you are seeing.
Maybe try re-installing the sheet?
Jon
Yes I inserted rows in Life Events and I think that broke it. I fixed it by restoring the sheet. Thanks!
Follow up questions.
When I put Income Budget Change / Year to 5%, it’s showing that my Yearly Cash Flow is becoming more negative. Shouldn’t it become more positive?
And when I put Expense Budget Change / Year to 3%, my Yearly Cash Flow doesn’t change?
Your image shows negative cash flow. Please see the language below which comes from the link below. Read this very closely. This template pulls amounts from the budget columns in your categories sheet. Modify those budget numbers and then those results will flow over.
Cheers,
Blake
The sheet works best if you have a Tiller Categories sheet with monthly Budgets in place for the current year.
Core Income and Expense Budgets
The Cash Flow Forecast sheet looks at the Categories sheet to establish your baseline cashflow from your existing income/expense budget. If you have monthly budget columns for the current year, those budget values will be annualized and used.
Income or expenses in categories that are hidden from reports are not included.
If you do not have budgets for the current year or want to use a different initial range, see the FAQ #1 below for how the initial Income and Expense range is determined and can be overridden.
This sheet doesn’t use any information from the Transactions or Balance History sheets. It only uses the amounts in your budget located in the Categories sheet.
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Hi @roger.chu91 ,
Thanks for alerting us to this issue.
I believe there is an error in the formula in hidden cell R2.
There is a reference to E5 in the POW() function that should be changed to E6.
New formula in R2:
=IFNA(ARRAYFORMULA(IF(ISNUMBER(L2:L),C12*POW(1+E6,L2:L-AF10) ,IFERROR(1/0))),IFERROR(1/0))
Give that a try and see if it makes more sense.
We will update the template shortly.
Jon
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Thank you so much! This is too advance for me so I’m just gonna wait for the updated template lol
@roger.chu91
The template has been update to version 0.91.
You can update your sheet using the Tiller Labs add on.
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Sorry, I am just lost on how this works. When i enter anything coming from the category sheet, (income) it seems to have the opposite effect. When I enter a manual Amount/Year and life events it seems to work as expected but I do not trust I am using it right now…
I have simplified an example of this. Why does bringing in your category as a life event REDUCE your “Adjusted Budget”? What is the point if using categories? I had assumed I would indicate "i expect this salary from this start to end years, and could enter another salary from an alternate job for a few other years but when i do this it basically goes negative no matter what.
Hi @Rocketghost ,
For Life Events, when you enter an Event/Category, you should also specify the Amount/Year that you expect for the Start through End period. In the example you provided for “Income - MWC Dist.” you have the start year as 2024 and the end year as 2030. The Cash Flow worksheet will automatically pull the 2024 Budget amount that you currently have specified for that category, however, you must enter an Amount/Year override. The value of $12,000 is shown as a convenient reference for you based on what you currently have in your Categories worksheet, and the intent is for you to specify a new value. Since you did not specify an Amount/Year, the calculation understands that for the period of 2024 through 2030 the “Income - MWC Dist.” is equal to zero.
For income, the amount should be positive and for expenses it should be a negative amount.
Hope this helps.
AHB
With this info i played with it a bit after simplifying it with a test sheet. I think I got it - basically anything you add into a life event overrides anything else coming from the category/budget sheet. I was totally under the wrong idea initially. Thanks. Also if you are not careful with your years, the “budget” aspect takes over again to populate the subsequent years. The only thing I am still wondering about is the “Change year” field. Is the purpose of that to simply to override what is in the initial settings field?
@Rocketghost are you referring to the Change / Year field in the table/config area? If so I believe that is supposed to be the % change growth you expect each year for that account as described here: Docs: Cash Flow Forecast