Is there any plan to support referencing fields in the category tracker when overriding values? This tool is very powerful to be able to match a transaction on many criteria; however, I am limited in its automation by only being able to override with static values for matched transactions.
For example, I would want to match a check transaction on various fields, and then set the “Note” (or “Description”) field to something like “Check #${Check Number} - TODO” where ${Check Number} references the value in the “Check Number” field, such as “1234”, for a final override value of “Check #1234 - TODO”. Instead, I have to manually go back to the transaction and set the check number in the “Note” field.
Another example might be for an interest payment. I might want to set the “Merchant Name” field to something like “${Account}” where ${Account} references the value in the “Account” field, such as “My Savings”.
Another option might be to extraction partial values. For example, I have a “Full Description” with “LYFT *RIDE MON 5AM” and I’d want to build a “Note” with the value “Taxi ride ${Full Description, /*ride (.+)/i, ‘$1’}” to become “Taxi ride MON 5AM”.
Of course, care would be needed so-as not to introduce circular dependencies; however, some sort of baseline could be set such as only returning pre-override values for any referenced fields.
I appreciate all the work put into this plugin so far and know that a feature like this would be invaluable and really set Tiller apart even further from its competitors.
Welcome @nyw ! Thank you for being part of the Tiller community. I’m not part of the product development team, but I am a Tiller user. I have also thought I would like a way to match checks or invoice numbers. Your post this morning gave me some extra motivation to see how this might achievable.
While this doesn’t directly address your feature request, one of the things I really appreciate about Tiller is its spreadsheet-based flexibility. This gives us the opportunity to explore custom formulas and scripts to achieve similar functionality. Here are a few friendly tips you might find helpful.
For the check number to be expressed in column M:
=“Check #” & [Check Number Column] & " - TODO"
For the check number extraction this might be achievable with RegEx. This article by Microsoft has some explanation of how to use RegEx. I use Google Gemini or ChatGPT to write my RegEx these days, much faster.
If the description field contains “Check #1234” as part of the text this might help grab the check number.
=IFERROR(REGEXEXTRACT(C2, “Check #(\d+)”), “”)
For referencing account balances, you’re correct that the Balances sheet doesn’t directly support a simple lookup since the account numbers are masked within longer text. One option is creating an Account Reference sheet where you map account numbers to account names and balances. Then, a straightforward VLOOKUP formula can pull balances into your Transactions sheet like this: =IFERROR(VLOOKUP(G2, AccountReference!A:C, 3, FALSE), “”).
Thanks again for sharing this idea. I look forward to interacting with you further in the Tiller community!
Thank you @TillerAlice. I appreciate the ideas here and great examples for working directly in transactions. I am, however, trying to keep formulas out of my transactions sheet as much as possible to maintain performance (I have a lot of data) so that the transactions sheet only contains static values. Thanks again!