Currently, I am using the Foundation Template for Tiller Money. I would like to start budgeting, I find it very unuseful to budget per the individual category. I’d like to use the catch-all group.
For example, I may have a “luxuries” group and beneath it have categories like “books, music, video games, art supplies” etc. I don’t have specific budgets for each of these individually per month, but I would like to have a budget for luxuries in general. So for example, I may budget $250 for Luxury a month, and may end up spending $50 in books one month, so I can only spend $200 on games and other things. But another month, I may not spend any money on books, so I can use that money on other luxuries.
Currently I can’t find a way to do that in the Foundation template. Is there some function or add-on I can use for this? Otherwise I am not sure how to budget effectively, since I don’t’ really budget per tiny category.
Hi,
I don’t have a workaround for your ask but it makes me wonder. What is the value of those sub categories for you if you don’t differentiate the expenses?
Hi @umbrees ,
There are a couple of ways to handle this but the way I like the best is to create a category rollup Category and put the budget in there.
For example, you might add a “Luxuries Rollup” category to your Category sheet. Assign it to the Luxuries Group. Then, put all of your Luxuries Budget into this category. Or if you want to have a budget for a specific Luxuries Budget category, you can give that a budget, but then don’t double-count and include that amount in the Roll category budget.
If you review your Group level budgets, you will be able to see if you are hitting your budgets.
There is no need to assign ANY transactions to this Rollup group.
If you don’t like the word Rollup, you could use other names such as “Luxuries Total” , “Luxuries Budget” or something like that.
@tali.lerner : I think it can be useful to see all those sub categories. It provides a clearer view of where your money is going. But not everyone wants or needs to see their expenses categorized down to the level. Using Tiller allows you to decide how detailed you want to be. There is no right answer.
To keep transaction-accurate categories and a single budget pool, my advice would be to take advantage of the Savings Budget template if you’re not already and create a Savings category for Luxuries under whatever group you feel is appropriate. You can then transfer accumulated savings from the Luxuries category to the various categories you accumulate expenses using the ADJUST ± column.
Can you explain how to create a rollup in Tiller? I’m testing it out, and not being able to set a Group level budget is a dealbreaker for me, so I’d love to find a solution Is there a community plugin I need to add to make this work?
On the Category sheet, of the Foundation Template, you can assign Groups to all your Categories. In addition to the regular categories, you can create a category for the Group Rollup, for example, Luxuries Rollup (using the example in the 1st post above.) You can put budget amounts in the Category sheet for all the individual categories in the Luxuries group and/or the Luxuries Rollup category.
The Monthly Budget and Yearly Budget sheet, and others, show the Group level budget and actual totals, in addition to the individual categories.
Hopefully, that should get you started. You might also look at the Saving Budget sheet, as mentioned above.
I understand the concept, but I’m confused how to create this rollup category. I added a category for this for my discretionary spending, but how do I make it function as a “rollup”? Not sure what I’m missing. Here’s a screenshot of what I have so far:
You could chose to add all the Discretionary Group budget to the top Discretionary Budget row. Or you can could budget amounts to Travel and Gifts rows.
Or you could add amounts to the Travel, Gifts, AND Discretionary Budget rows. The total of those 3 would be your total Discretionary Group budget.
On many of the budget reports mentioned earlier, you can view the Discretionary Budget Group, in addition to the 3 different categories within that Group.
If this doesn’t work for you, then you might be thinking of a different use of “Rollups.”
I understand the idea of a rollup, but I don’t know how you’re achieving this in the spreadsheet. What, specifically, would I do from here in Google Sheets? I have the categories, what do I need to do to get the result you’re talking about?
Now you can categorize your transactions on the Transactions sheet in the Foundation Template.
Then view the Foundation Template’s Monthly Budget sheet and you can see how you are doing by comparing actuals to budget. You can also see the results on the Yearly Budget sheet.
Here’s more info on how to use Tiller’s Money Budget sheet:
Budgets for both individual categories and Group Totals are listed on those sheets.
You don’t need to use any other Google sheets. Of course, if you want to create your own customized sheets using the data from Transactions and Categories sheets, you can do that too. There are many examples of that in the Community here.
Seconding this ask. The proposed solution so far does not seem to fully address the need.
As an example, let’s say I have a Group “Food”, and within that Group I have two categories: “Groceries” and “Restaurants”.
I may want to set an overall budget for Food, the Group, of $500, rather than for the specific Restaurants and Groceries categories, but I still want the ability to report on how much I spent specifically in each category of Restaurants and Food so I still want to use those categories for the actual transactions. Or maybe I have more than those two categories, but I don’t care so much about how much specifically is spent in each of those as long as overall I don’t exceed $500 for Food, but again I still want the ability to see more granularly how that $500 was spent in a given timeframe.
Am I missing something with how the Rollup Category proposal above would meet this need?
Thanks for your reply @randy. For the $900 Food budget example, you had assign a $ value to each category below it (Groceries, Restaurants, Snacks/Coffee) to total to that $900, right?
Essentially what I want to do is leave that budget at $900 for Food, but maybe have $300 for Groceries and $200 for Restaurants, leaving $400 of unassigned “float” budget that I still want to track against Food spend but don’t care to assign to any specific categories within Food. Is that possible?
I totally understand that the way you are thinking about the problem is different than the spreadsheet model… and it probably is a more pragmatic approach to budgeting… but the tool as-designed doesn’t work that way.
I think the mental hack is to just assign $500 for Groceries and $400 for Restaurants (i.e. best guess distribution) and then as you monitor the outputs in the Monthly Budget dashboard don’t sweat the red on the individual budgets and pay attention only to the group budgets.
Another thought is that you definitely can update the conditional formatting with a little fussing to highlight overages at the group level and ignore individual category overages.
We’re hearing this quite a bit from customers coming from Mint. We don’t have a short term solution to this. The template is just built to budget at the category level, not the group level.
@moneymatt you could just use a “Food:Float” category that you use for things you don’t care to assign to a specific category.
Is there a community plugin I need to add to make this work?
