Hello!
Although I have a negative balance in the bank acount, the Insights sheet balance is showing as positive (the exact same number, but with wrong signal).
Would somebody please shed a light on how to solve this?
Thank you,
Alex.
PS: I am using Tiller for Google Sheets.
Hi @alexvpp:
In your Balance History sheet, is the most recent balance imported for this account logged as a negative number?
Hi @Brad.warren
After I´ve sent this message, I made a deposit to the Tiller monitored account to make it positive, so my most recent balance imported for this account is positive.
But the previous balance, that is negative in the bank, is showing positive in Tiller balance history.
Hi @alexvpp:
When I change the most recent balance for an account in my Balance History sheet to negative, it appears as negative in the Insights sheet. Interesting.
It looks like this has something to do with how your bank is feeding balance information to the aggregator or it is something in Yodlee.
Perhaps others, here, have insight.
My Liability accounts show as positive in the Balance History sheet. For example, when I run up my credit card over the month, my Balance History shows a positive balance (with negative Transactions) in the Transactions sheet. This may differ from the way your bank shows the balance on their site.
Balances in Balance History are absolute values (at least they should be) so this sounds like it’s working as expected.
Hi @heather and @randy: I agree that the template is functioning as expected, but something to think about: a credit card balance is brought in to Tiller as an absolute value but treated formulaically in the templates as a negative number for the calculation of net worth. That makes total sense.
The negative balance of a bank account doesn’t seem quite the same, and I wonder why it is treated as an absolute value in the templates. If the bank and data aggregators are able to pass a negative number on to Tiller as a negative balance, it may make sense to let it stand so that its impact is appropriately accounted for in the user’s net worth calculations and elsewhere.
There may be more here than I understand…just some thoughts.
I don´t understand why balances should be absolute values. What am I missing?
When I first opened my Tiller spreadsheet the other day, and checked the Insights sheet, and saw a positive value on the balance of my two most used accounts, I´ve got one information. When I opened my bank statement and saw that the absolute value was correct, but the sign was negative, so I was indebted to the bank, I´ve got another information.
The discrepancy between this two informations can be a serious one, as if I get indebted to the bank here in Brazil the interest rates are huge.
So I´d like to better understand the rational behind the absolute number in the balance sheet. In the end, when I check the balance sheet for my checking account, I want to understand how much money I have available.
Thank you,
Alex.
This is just the way we get them from our data provider and then combined with the “class” (asset or liability) we use that for how to calculate it for net worth.
So when you look at your Balances sheet if you see a balance on the Liabilities side you have run up debt.
Does that help?
Hi Heather,
Yes, it does help. Thank you.
i completely agree that this is odd. I have changed my sheets to show my liabilities as Negative amounts. Otherwise it is just confusing.
How did you do it, if you dont mind me asking?
I basically jsut run a quick if statement that looks up if the value is an Asset or Liability and if liability I multiply by -1. Here is the formula that I use on the my custom sheet that tracks the Bank Balance but it can be applied to the Balances sheet from Tiller.
=iferror(sort(filter({INDIRECT(X11),indirect(X17),INDIRECT(X12),INDIRECT(X13),today()-INDIRECT(X15),If(InDirect(X17)=“Asset”,Indirect(X16),Indirect(X16)*-1)},indirect(X18) <>“Hide”),3, true, 4, true),1/0)
Here is the key section where I run the test on Asset type and return either a positive or negative balance
If(InDirect(X17)=“Asset”,Indirect(X16),Indirect(X16)*-1)