Docs: Holiday Gift Planner

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Overview

Use this Holiday Gift Planner sheet to track your gift spending during the holidays or any time of year you’re planning to spend on gifts. That could be birthdays, employee perks, or student incentive prizes.

How To Install

  1. Install or launch the Tiller Community Solutions add-on
  2. Open the add-on and choose "Gifts” from the tags dropdown on the Explore tab
  3. Click on Holiday Gift Planner
  4. Choose “Add to spreadsheet”

This will add a Holiday Planner sheet to your spreadsheet and a Tag column to your Transactions sheet if one doesn’t already exist.

How To Use the Gift Planner

  • Enter the names of the people you want to give gifts to in Column A under "Recipient (use as the tag in Transactions). You can use just their first names, just their last names, or both first and last names. Whatever you pick, those will be the exact names you will add to the Tags column in the Transaction sheet when one of the purchases for that person appears in the Transaction sheet.

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  • When you add a recipient, you can also add a Budget amount for that person. Or, you can wait until you enter the proposed gifts in the Gift List section.

  • In the Gift List section starting in Row 55, enter individual gifts to track. For each gift, you can enter a description, the recipient, a reference or estimated price, the status, a Link to the item online, and notes. You are not required to use any of these columns, but use the ones you think will help organize your holiday purchases.

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You can only select a recipient if they have been added to the Recipient List above. One recipient can, of course, have several rows of gifts. Lucky them!

Status options are Idea, Purchased, Wrapped and Shipped.

  • Head back to the top of the sheet. You will see the total amount for each person if you entered Reference prices in the Gift List column. This can help you adjust or add the Budget amount in column B. The total budget will be calculated in B8.

  • As gift transactions start appearing in your Transactions sheet, tag them with the exact Recipient names. The total for each person will appear in the Spent column. You can also see how much budget is left for each person in the Budget Available column, based on your Budget and actual, tagged transactions.

  • The Purchased / Ideas column uses the Gift List and counts gift Purchases and Ideas. For the purposes of this column, every gift is counted as an Idea. All gifts that are in status Purchased, Wrapped and Shipped count as Purchased here.

  • In the middle section, you can get a Detailed view for the Recipient you select in B32. This includes actual transactions where they have been tagged and their items in the Gift List` below.

This section has a limit of the last 15 transactions for the selected person.

Webinar Replay

Troubleshooting

If you have a question or need help first search the community to see if someone has already asked and if not click here to quickly post a question about this template in the Google Sheets category.

Be sure to customize the title of your post with keywords about the issue or question so others can easily find the Q&A in search.

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I’m setting up the Holiday Planner solution and have run into an issue.

I’ve applied the Holiday Planner solution to the foundations template. Following the user guide I’ve added a new category for “Vacation”. I’ve then added that tag as a recipient name in the Holiday Planner tab. I then marked a transaction as Vacation.

This transaction does not appear under the Holiday Planner tab as expected.

Additionally when I set a budget for the gift it adds that same amount to the spent chart.

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Hi @bonominijl,
I think you might not be setting up the sheet correctly.

You say you ‘added a new category for “Vacation”’. But the Holiday Gift Planner doesn’t use the categories at all. It just uses Tags.

In the Transactions sheet, use the Tag column to track holiday purchases. The tag column keyword that you use use match the recipient name in Column A of the Holiday Gift Planner.

Give this a try and perhaps re-read the instructions above. Let us know if that solves the issue.

Best,
Jon

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We’ve closed this topic for replies. If you have a question or need help first search the community to see if someone has already asked and if not click here to quickly post a question about this template in the Get Help > Spreadsheet templates category.

Be sure to customize the title of your post with keywords about the issue or question so others can easily find the Q&A in search.

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An update was made to the Holiday Gift Planner to fix the formula for the Total Spent.

The update, version 1.02, is now available in the Tiller Community Solutions add-on.

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Another update to the Holiday Gift Planner was just published.

You can now select All Transaction dates OR use your custom selected dates for gift transactions.

Now, you can limit your results to one Holiday Season.

Use the Tiller Community Solutions add-on to update to Version 1.03.

Jon

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