This is a general workflow question. The most basic question I find myself asking every time I look at my Tiller spreadsheet is “What changed since last time I looked at this and why?” More specifically I’m looking at balances tab or the Net Worth breakdown and I see that balances went up/down, then I try to figure out why by looking at transactions. It works, but feels cumbersome.
After learning about Net Worth Snapshot add-in, I find that I usually start there as it tells me easily for each account what changed, then I can drill into that particular account to understand why.
What I’m looking for is a view that for a given time period shows starting balance, ending balance and rolled up transactions organized by category that took place in-between + for bonus points any delta not attributed to transactions such as portfolio growth in case of investment accounts.
Wondering if such a view exists or if not, how others are handling this type of workflow?
Yep, I’m using NW Snapshot and it’s super helpful, but now I see a delta from one date to the next, to understand the reason for that delta, I need to switch to Transactions / filter acount, feels non-intuitive. Perhaps this is an opportunity to create something new.
I’m guessing that it’s a tough problem to solve unless the data providers attach current balance to every transaction, because otherwise, it would be really brittle in the face of discrepancies. Some banks do this in their online banking portals, but I don’t think the aggregators, like Plaid and Yodlee include this data.