I’m a new Tiller user. I’m currently including all our spending accounts and investment accounts because one of the huge advantages of Tiller is seeing net worth. However, all the investment transactions are cluttering up my budget, making categorizing unweildly. I transfer into (and soon out of with retirement looming) investment accounts, so I need to include investment accounts for transfers.
What’s the best setup for clean spending tracking, but also see net worth and be able to transfer in and out of investment accounts?
I utilize AutoCat heavily for investment transactions so much that I don’t ever have to mess with them, they are automatically categorized for me. Because of this, I forget that they are even there.
As @mu3484343 suggested, many people use AutoCat to either mark for deletion or to use a Transfer Category that will simply be hidden from reports like Net Worth. Deleting them has a pro of reducing your Transactions sheet data size for better performance, assuming you don’t care about having these transactions.
Welcome! I also use AutoCat. I regularly filter by “Investment” category and simply delete those transactions. There is a feature request somewhere out there to allow us to sync balance only (no transactions) per account. For now you’ll have to work around these transactions.
My Fidelity statements have a lot of annoying noisy transactions about moving money into and out of “core” money market funds that Fidelity does automatically, as needed, whenever cash is received into or spent from the account.
I made a category called “Noise” that I put into Group “Financial” of type “Transfer”, and then I use AutoCat to categorize these noise transactions as “Noise”.
The reason why this works is that the type “Transfer” is pretty much ignored by everything. E.g., transactions of this type don’t show up at all in the Spending Trends sheet, etc.
The type “Transfer” is a bit confusing, since Tiller also comes with a category called “Transfer” that is of type “Expense”, not “Transfer”. I use the “Transfer” category when moving money from one tracked account to another. In this case the positive and negative “expenses” of the transfers should cancel each other out. I use the Transfer category for transferring money between accounts, since if the money is not received in the other account, it will show up as a net expense in the Spending Trends sheet, and I will hopefully notice that money has gone missing.
I have a Category called Investment Transactions that I hide from reports. Anything in an investment account that is a buy/sell, dividend, auto reinvest, etc is marked as an Investment Transaction. I don’t use Autocat because I like to see/touch each downloaded transaction.
I also have Fidelity accounts and have those Core “Noise” transactions as @DarkWater calls them (perfect description!). I just delete the lines for these self-cancelling Core transactions. We keep all the investment accounts in Tiller because we are doing cash transfers between them and need that information.
I have a Category called Transfers that I hide from reports. In AutoCat, I assign the Category “Transfers” to my investment accounts in the Account Contains column. I’m careful about which accounts I do this for. I still have to manually categorize some transfers, such as credit card payments, but that’s okay with me. My net worth and account balances are all correct.
There’s probably a fancier way to handle it, but I haven’t been willing to spend the time to figure one out.
I’m in the minority here, but I didn’t like messing around with my Transactions sheet, so I use a method/template that is linked to my investment accounts, and I copy those Balance History records periodically into my primary Tiller sheet (so no transactions, just balances.)
. Queries on this come up periodically.