The Google Sheets Category Tracker has been our third-most-popular template historically with thousands and thousands of downloads. This build of the Excel Category Tracker rebrands it from “Excel Money Tracker” and harmonizes it with the popular features in the Sheets version, including the addition of Description totals (the columns at right) for the selected period.
This template will help you dig deeper into your spending for a selected category by reviewing the Transaction details over a configurable time period. See the sum of spending for all categories for a given date range.
This worksheet is just a personal contribution to the Tiller community and is thereby not supported by our Customer Success team.
How To Install the Worksheet
Add Excel Tables to Your Workbook (if necessary)
If you have a newer version of the Excel Foundation Workbook, you can skip this step. Otherwise, you’ll need to add Excel tables to your spreadsheet that contain the contents of the Transactions, Categories and Balance History worksheets before adding the worksheet.
Before adding the worksheet, you’ll need to add Excel tables to your spreadsheet that contain the contents of the Transactions, Categories and Balance History worksheets.
Set up the Excel Table:
Select the entire used data range (including the header row)
Click Insert/Table in the file menu
Check the “My table has headers” checkbox
Click “Ok” in the Create Table modal dialog
Assign a Table Name in the little text box in the top left of the toolbar— use “Categories” in the Categories worksheet, “Transactions” in the Transactions worksheet, and use “BalanceHistory” for the Balance History worksheet.
Follow these instructions to copy the downloaded template into your Excel workbook and to connect the formula references to your local workbook data.
At this point your new template should be functional and linked to your local workbook’s data.
How to Use the Worksheet
Most of the improvements are under the hood. Functionally, the new Category Tracker is the same to use as the old one which is documented here.
The chart and description totals are new, but are pretty self explanatory.
Give Us Feedback (Please)
If you take this for a spin , please let us know how it works for you.
We are planning some improvements to our Excel solution and your feedback will help guide us.
One thing to verify is if using the “Links” option you can replace the link to the new workbook. That might be a safer option.
In the image below, it’s the first “links” option. This icon won’t show up if your workbook has no links.
I use the search bar to get it, but I’m sure there’s another way.
Hi,
I would love more use of Excel with Tiller solutions!
I tried to insert your v1.50 sheet into my existing Tracker, but it really didn’t work. I had better luck moving my transactions and categories to the v1.50 template. Now it is working fine.
I would really love a Tiller solution of some kind for Envelope budgeting for Excel. I’ve tried this, but I’m not proficient enough with Excel to do it. It became impossible for me because Excel has no easy equivelent to the Sheets Query function. Thanks!
Thanks for the feedback @yossiea and @jemmoa7. I apologize for not getting back to you sooner, but have been working on some other things.
I like your suggestion of using the “Edit Links…” workflow. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the “Break Link” button to do the trick (it just converted my data to static values) but I was able to get the “Change Source” button to work. I updated the original instructions. Any chance you can try again and let me know if it works for you… or if you have feedback to improve the instructions?
P.S. I hear you, @jemmoa7, on the need for an Envelope Budget in Excel. That is on our roadmap but unfortunately isn’t imminent. For now, I recommend using the Savings Budget in Sheets.
There’s something with the named range, I can’t even edit “Categories”
also, IIRC, you can filter and return more than one column at a time in Excel.
-edit- Actually, the error is in the Group/Type columns. You are filtering on Categories, so hidden stuff still show up because no categories are named “Hidden.” You still need to filter on “Hide From Reports.”
In the header, you include Transfers, but in most cases those will be hidden, I’m not seeing any transfers on my end. (Could be the fix I had to put in got rid of it, but in any event, transfers don’t really impact the numbers so it might not be needed.)
There should be an option to sort by Category or Type/Group, and possibly even having the option to sort/summarize by Group/Category.
BTW, one of the things that might be helpful is filtering only certain categories/groups.
You can do this in the filter, or a drop box. I have one off categories that I don’t want to really see since it won’t change my budget, so I would exclude that oftentimes.
(Categories[Hide From Reports]<>"Hide")*( Categories[Category]<>D1))
The reason I didn’t do it this way, @yossiea, is that people may have a different column order in their Categories sheet (or a new personalized column inserted in the middle of the standard Categories-Groups-Type) and I want to pick out those specific columns. I agree that it is harder to read but I think it is more robust when users personalize their workbooks.
Not sure if this was from you or from Tiller, but if you go to name manager, you will see some ranges that are no longer applicable and hardcoded to c:…
Folks, incorporated Tracker v1.51 Workbook. Followed instructions and works great in my new Excel Tiller Feeds workbook. Tried both Randy’s and yossiea’s “Links” methods. Both option work great. The only issue I had was learning the “Date Features” for the Pie chart associated with Transactions and Categories. After “Creating a Copy” of Tracker v1.51 Workbook into my Excel Tiller feeds, the Pie char was scrambled… I then modified the Dates to Jan 1 2022 to Mar 31, 2022 and now have a nice pie chart!. Great new worksheet. Great instruction how to get it incorporated into my Excel Tiller Feeds workbook. Fun to see Excel come alive with regard to Tiller!!!
The only “issue” if you can call it one, was on Excel, the Category dropdown on the far right of the sheet was not set up. I set it up and all was great.
Jim
If you have a newer version of the Excel Foundation Workbook, you can skip this step. Otherwise, you’ll need to add Excel tables to your spreadsheet that contain the contents of the 
, please let us know how it works for you.
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