Closed Account: Retain History But Keep from Showing Up Going Forward

Google Sheets
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for a closed account, how do I get it to show up on my historical data (net worth snapshot, networth tracker) but stop showing up on my current balances. I changed the balance history so that it shows a 0$ balance but I rather it stop showing up on current balance and on networth sheets going forward

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@joshmccormackpt, you just need to unlink it from the sheet - so it will no longer pull in data on the Balance History sheet.

Does that help?

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Heather, is there a way to tell Tiller to stop trying to update a closed account without removing it? Seems like having unnecessary update failures isn’t useful.

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Well unlinking it is different than removing it, which I interpret as removing it from the Console entirely :slight_smile: Unlinking it just removes the linkage from the sheet for future data, but if it’s a closed account there isn’t likely to be any future data so neither of those really solves this.

In either case it shouldn’t fail to update, it just won’t update.

And my original reply actually wouldn’t stop it from showing on the Balances sheet and Net Worth sheets as I re-read this. To prevent it from showing on those sheets you’d need to hide it, but you’d also be hiding the historical data so I don’t think there is actually a way to do this.

@aronos , are you having an issue with an account? Just curious why you’re asking.

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Hi @heather

I misread the original question so my follow-up wasn’t as related as I thought. But here’s what I’m looking at:

I have closed one of my investment accounts and my bank is shutting down, so I’m moving my checking and savings accounts. I want to maintain the history for them in my sheets for budget and net worth tracking/history. I’d also like to maintain the history on Tiller so it will download load if I ever had to start a new sheet fresh. What is the best way to deal with that? If I remove them from the console will it remove the server side history too?

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@aronos

Based on my experience, this is what I would do.

  1. Delete the accounts on the console. This will not delete any history that is already in Tiller. No need to access these accounts via Tiller again since they are now closed so no problems here.
  2. The accounts will still show on the accounts sheet. Leave those alone.
  3. You do not need to employ any hides anywhere.
  4. The historical data will remain on the balance history and transactions sheets and be available for use on the comparison sheets, net worth sheets, etc.
  5. The accounts will still show up on the balances sheet but their balances will be zero.
  6. To get the updated column on the balances sheet to show today, enter a manual entry on the balances history sheet and use a date in the future like 12-31-21.
  7. If you ever need to move to a new sheet, all the data is there and able to be moved over just like normal.

Cheers,

Blake

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Thanks, @Blake

I think I have an unreasonable fear that “somehow” I’ll completely lose my historical data, even though logically I know that the events that would have to take place for that to actually happen would probably result in that information being completely useless to me anyway. When it comes to data backup my head is still in the 90s sometimes, where I suffered one too many “catastrophic” data losses. :crazy_face:

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@aronos

Here is a clever way to backup.

Set up a Mint account and link all your accounts. Check back regularly to be sure the links remain intact.

If you lose everything in 2025, just go back to Mint and export everything there out to Excel. You might not have the categories, but at least you will have the raw data needed to rebuild.

Blake

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Perhaps @heather or @brasten or @tom can confirm, @aronos, but I think @Blake is correct that deleting the account from the Tiller Money Console will remove the plumbing for gathering new data but will preserve the data that is already in the feeds-service back end. ← EDIT: THIS IS INCORRECT (see below)

As I type this though, I’m wondering how you’d access that if you wanted to start a new spreadsheet and pull in the historic data if there was no reference to the account on the Console UX. :thinking: (Of course you could pull over that history manually or via the Migration Helper.)

Perhaps the best approach is to unlink the obsolete account from the spreadsheet but leave the connection intact in the Console. Then, if you started a new spreadsheet, you’d be able to link the account to the spreadsheet and pull down those old transactions.

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This is a clever solution, @Blake. You could go one step further and just set the date on the most recent balance entry to “=TODAY()”.

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See my #2 above. Those deleted accounts will still show in the accounts tab. Do not touch those. He is closing the accounts. Once closed, usually you cannot access your account online anymore. If you cannot access, Yodlee cannot either. Even if you can access, you will only get 3 months of historical data at the most. If he were to start a new sheet in 3 months, the last 3 months would yield nothing because there is no activity since the account is closed. If he wants to start a new sheet, he can manually bring the data in from the current sheet. Blake

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According to the warning (which of course doesn’t always mean anything) it removes it. Which is fine. I need to get past the unreasonable fear that my spreadsheets will somehow completely disappear. :crazy_face:

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@randy Thanks. This would be changing the raw data which is not smart to do in my mind. Lets say in the future you wanted to know what date was there before you changed it to the formula? You would not know the answer for sure. My way, its stays intact and I accomplish the same end result, all while documenting what I am doing. Cheers, Blake

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This is incorrect. If you remove an account from the Console it will remove any existing data in our database for that account, but it does not remove it from the sheet so you’ll have the data in the sheet as a backup but you wouldn’t be able to feed that accounts historical data into another / new sheet automatically (but you could use copy/paste)

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@heather @randy Resurrecting an old thread here, but did we confirm that it’s impossible to hide an account from balances while also maintaining historical graphs?

I do a lot of credit card churning, and usually I just hide these accounts knowing the data is missing from history graphs, and it’s not a huge deal because it doesn’t change it too much… Also I can attest to just removing old accounts completely from the console. Not a big deal since the data is still in the spreadsheet. I’m a fairly old customer, and I switched from Net Worth template to Foundations just to track Net Worth and Balances, not categories or anything (still using Envelope Template for actual budget). I had no trouble migrating the old historic balances and accounts to foundations even though I had a lot of accounts I deleted from the console.

However, I recently did a refinance several months back, and I still have a Mortgage account listed as $0 because it messes up the liability graph pretty badly if I hide it. Same thing for an investment account rollover at $0 to keep historic asset data in the graphs.

Am I just going to have to deal with it? :slight_smile:

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Sorry for the late response, @rdy373… you’ve been really patient.

I think you have a few options but probably none offering the full flexibility you’re wanting:

  • Add a new override entry in the Accounts sheet to Hide an account. The intent is that most balanced-based spreadsheets will just ignore any account with this designation.
  • Use the Repair Balance History workflow to roll the account into the new card that replaces it. This approach simplifies your account history— e.g. it’s as if the previous account didn’t exist in name but did exist in terms of balance history (i.e. under the newer account name). I’d want to double check for you, but I think the way to do this would be to 1) filter on the old account name/index, 2) replace the Account ID on all of the old entries with the new/current Account ID, 3) run the Repair Balance History and let the workflow rename all the old entries to the current account.

Hope this helps.
Randy

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Archived Linked Accounts

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I never ended up following-up on the suggestions, but what I found worked for me is just keeping the existing accounts how they were (so that it doesn’t mess with net worth graphs). They end up getting greyed out anyways because the data is so old. I created two new “groups” called zClosed Accounts (z so it shows up on the bottom of the balance page). One for assets and one for liabilities. I got used to seeing it like that over the years and doesn’t bother me.

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Thanks for that update @rdy373

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@randy Consider this fix:

  1. Allow Accounts!D2:D to accept “Closed” in addition to “Hide” and NULL.
  2. Enter this into Balances!K2 =iferror(sort(filter({INDIRECT(Y11),INDIRECT(Y12),INDIRECT(Y13)&if(isblank(INDIRECT(Y14)),""," ("&INDIRECT(Y14)&")"),today()-INDIRECT(Y15),Indirect(Y16)},indirect(Y17)="Asset",indirect(Y18)<>"Hide",indirect(Y18)<>"Closed"),2,true, 4, true, 3, true))
  3. Similarly, enter this into Balances!R2 =iferror(sort(filter({INDIRECT(Y11),INDIRECT(Y12),INDIRECT(Y13)&if(isblank(INDIRECT(Y14)),""," ("&INDIRECT(Y14)&")"),today()-INDIRECT(Y15),Indirect(Y16)},indirect(Y17)="Liability",indirect(Y18)<>"Hide",indirect(Y18)<>"Closed"),2,true, 4, true, 3, true))

The code simply adds one more additional filter to any accounts marked “Closed” in Column D on the Accounts sheet. They will no longer clutter up your Balances sheet but transactions/balances will still populate all other reports.

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