Right now I bucket my expenses using the Group and Categories options but want to further bucket them by necessary and unnecessary expenses; as in, if I needed to cut costs, I could easily focus on the “Discretionary” expenses to do so.
I don’t see a good way to do this with Tiller’s current architecture. Has anyone built something custom for this?
Thanks @Russellreno. But I am already using the category tab like you are and thus not available for me to further group them by discretionary and fixed.
I use type group category. What are your 4 levels?
can you delicately add a column on categories tab?
@hbwilliams22 recommend the Tags column on the Categories sheet
Then you can generate a Category Rollup report and filter by tag.
@heather Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve found tags to be a bit cumbersome and abandoned using them altogether pretty quickly. I would rather tiller intelligently label expenses based on category to be either “fixed” or “discretionary” vs. manually tagging them. Similar to how it auto-fills Group based on Category.
Why not consider what I call trick-naming your Groups; e.g., Discretionary-Entertainment or D-Entertainment and Fixed-Monthly Bills or F-Monthly Bills. Or maybe 1 = Discretionary and 2 = Fixed with the real group name after the 1 or 2?
I have a separate dashboard that pulls values from the Envelope Budget Sheet. The dashboard displays spending in the various Categories I chose and I have them summed into different groups (small “g” groups, not the Groups the main sheet uses). You could easily do this and just name them Discretionary and Fixed.
@hbwilliams22, you can add a column to the Categories sheet to handle this and add a data validation rule to have a dropdown for two options “Fixed” “Discretionary” and then do reporting on that in a pivot table if you wanted. Instead of using the Group column you would use the special category column.
Thanks @heather. Would be awesome if Tiller could include this in a sheet update. Once you get many categories and sub categories built out, tracking can get a little overwhelming. A built out view in a dashboard would be super helpful.
