Excel Zero Based Budgeting Comprehensive Spend and Cashflow Management Tool

Microsoft Excel Show & Tell
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What is the goal of your workflow? What problem does it solve, or how does it help you?

This is an Excel-Only Zero Based Budgeting and Debt Elimination Planning worksheet that integrates with Tiller Money data feeds and includes:

  • Debt Elimination Simulation using Snowball, Avalanche, and Custom payoff methods
  • Auto-categorization
  • Smart-category-suggestions
  • Transaction Splits
  • Reconciliation
  • Monthly and Annual spend plan management
  • Reporting
  • Data quality validation
  • Full-year cashflow forecasting and management.
  • Auto file-lock with personal password for data security

Overview
Overview795Ă—310 23.8 KB

How did you come up with the idea for your workflow?

I used Quicken for over 20 years and was never satisfied with the budgeting capabilities so I ended up building my own Excel tool, importing data from Quicken into it. I gave it to some close friends to use, and one of them asked me if there was a way they could import bank data directly into it. I did some research and found Tiller Money. Actually I found Money in Excel and Tiller Money. However, it was quickly obvious that there is no comparison and Tiller Money has by far the best user-value proposition. Even though the Tiller Money Excel template is in Beta all I really needed was the data feed. It was really easy to integrate Tiller Money in the Excel workbook.

This was done as a hobby for me on weekends. Meanwhile, I have seen over the past few months a number of Excel users asking for more features within the Tiller Ecosystem. I figured it would be good to make this available as a free option that “natively” supports Tiller imports for those individuals until the Tiller Team incorporates more features into the Excel offering. It is not part of the Tiller Excel Template, so needs to be linked separately from the template. I hope there are a couple of people who find this userful.

Please describe your workflow. What are the sheets? Does it use any custom scripts or formulas?

This is built with scripts and is (mostly) locked for customization (except for a few free sheets where you can add any custom pivots, graphs, reports, etc). It is built to provide a comprehensive budgeting solution in Excel for individuals who do not have a lot of deep Excel knowledge and want something feature-full without requiring a lot of their own customization work. That may not fit the desire for a lot of spreadsheet power-users on this forum, but I am sure there are those who are in this zone! Happy to provide something of value if someone has the need.

Anything else you’d like people to know?

I am interested in feedback and suggestions for improvement. It is not intended for a large audience, as it is just my hobby, but I will be improving the tool for my own use and would be glad to entertain suggestions for improvement or to answer questions that are not covered in the built-in documentation or the videos (please use those first!).

Is it ok for others to copy, use, and modify your workflow?

The tool is completely free to use (outside of course the Tiller Money subscription), but requires an activation file to continue to use after the first 90 days. The free activation file is valid for all future versions and has no expiration date. As mentioned above it is built with scripts and is (mostly) locked for customization (except for a few free sheets where you can add any custom pivots, graphs, reports, etc).

This post is my invitation for the TillerMoney audience to download and use the template/tool. The link includes a zip file, a release notes PDF file, and an Installation Instructions PDF file (ie: how to extract the zip contents).

The workbook only runs on Excel, and only on a local version of Excel (Office365). All data remains local. It also only runs on the Windows operating system (does not yet support Apple/Mac computers).

If you said yes above, please make a copy of your workflow and share the copy’s URL:

Download Link: MMM_ToolDownload - Google Drive

User Guide: Managing MyMoney - YouTube

Each sheet in the workbook has built-in instructions. However, the above YouTube channel has detailed examples and instructions. Note that the video links are also embedded in the Excel sheet itself for each access. The > 20 videos are each quite long, however you can skip through to find what you need.

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Thanks so much for sharing this @Alex.Mtz and welcome to the Tiller Money Community! :wave:

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Updating this post on April 2022

I am glad to see quite a few people have downloaded this Excel Zero-Based Budgeting worksheet. I have had some very good suggestions for improvements that have been implemented over the past year.

A couple of comments…

The Excel tool has had quite a number of productivity enhancements since the original posting. As a result, a few of the original videos are out of date. In those cases I have added pop-up advertisements in the relevant Youtube videos to link to the respective update video. I will work on replacing the impacted videos to get everything back up to date.

I will not be posting about product update details on this thread… I have been consistently putting a cumulative release notes file in the download folder … see original post… for all updates (major new features and minor updates).

Alex

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Hi,
I would really like to try this excel solution out but - I get this error message when I try to enable macros. The Dll files are in the same directory, but it wants to access a dll in the cloud. Can you help me? EDIT: I figured out the problem. I had the files in a OneDrive folder. I moved them all to a non-One-Drive folder and it worked.
Thanks

ERROR MESSAGE ABOUT ENABLING MACROS
ERROR MESSAGE ABOUT ENABLING MACROS1582Ă—561 77.5 KB

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@jemmoa7
I am glad you figured it out quickly. I was planning to respond with the same resolution. Let me know if you have any other troubles or questions. I updated the initial post above with the shortcut to the YouTube channel that has the instructional videos (the individual video links are also embedded in the workbook). I recommend that you send in the generated ComputerID shown on the initial splash screen directly to me at mmm.expenseplanning@gmail.com. You can activate it on as many computers as you need… it gives unlimited free use and the initial splash screen goes away.

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Hello! I’m enjoying trying to figure out how your budget system works. A big question I have is this scenario:
I come into a bunch of extra money and I want to add it to my “Things Not Budgeted For” category which is in the negative. I don’t want to allocate it on a monthly basis for the rest of the year. I also don’t want it to be annual account . I just want to top up the category with my new found funds. How do I do that?
It isn’t clear to me how to move funds between categories?

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The system is actually 2 parallel envelope systems managed for you. One is a total amount of money you defined as spendable within the month, divided into a set of envelopes (categories). You can easily change funds between the categories even on a daily basis within the month. In fact this is highly encouraged (refer to the Month Management sheet… let me know if you viewed my video on Month management). The second set of envelopes is a total amount of money you defined as spendable anytime in the year, divided into a set of envelopes (categories). You can easily change funds between the categories on a monthly basis within the year or even reallocate funds for the same category across the year to different months (refer to the Year Management sheet… let me know if you viewed my video on Annual management).

Now for your scenario… I did not fully understand the use case so I will attempt….

Because it is a zero sum budget system, every dollar of income is accounted for (assigned to fund an expense plan). However, you mention being in the negative. So I believe you have a prioritized set of unfunded items that you want to fund later in the year IF/WHEN additional money becomes available (overtime work, unplanned bonus, tax refund, side gig, …). Since the intent of the budget is to help you set goals, prioritize and make decisions, I would recommend to not have a single “Things Not Budgeted For” category. Instead you could have an “UNFUNDED” GROUP, and put specific items in the group as categories that you want to fund but cannot yet (“Trip to Bahamas”, “New Lawn Mower”, “Expand Workshop”).

Now… having a set of unfunded but prioritized “future spend goals” is easily doable. You can do that without impacting your Annual or Monthly plans by:

  • set each unfunded item to type Annual (“UNFUNDED:Expand WorkShop” Type=Annual)
  • put in the Annual field the total amount you need to fund that goal (money you do not yet have)
    (UNFUNDED:Expand WorkShop Amount = $1,200)
  • flag it as a “Pre-Tax” Goal. (note: Pre-Tax Goal shows “401K” as an example, but can be used for unfunded items) These goals will not show up (yet) on either the Monthly or Annual management sheets. The money assigned to them will also not count against your income allocation (your plan will not go Red).

When new money comes in add it to your Income sheet. Your Expense Plan will show a positive balance (unallocated money). Leave it positive (unallocated) until enough money comes in to fund one of your unfunded goals. As soon as you hit that amount remove the Pre-Tax Goal flag and it will be swept into your Zero-Sum budget (balance will go away) and it will now show up in your Annual management sheet. At this time if you want you can also switch it to monthly and put in the monthly amount (you can expand the green details area and only add in the months remaining in the year).

Example: You get $800 extra cash in your account. You add it to your Income sheet and your Expense Planning shows a Positive $800 balance. You look at your 5 Unfunded goals and see that one can be funded for $600. But you have a higher priority to fund the $1,200 workshop upgrade. So you leave the $800 positive balance. 2 months later you get another $400 extra cash. You add to the Income sheet and you now have $1,200 positive. You decide to use that to fund your workshop. You simply remove the Goals flag from the “UNFUNDED:Expand Workshop” item and you will see the balance will go to zero and your Workshop upgrade will automatically now show up on your Annual expense plan.

P.S: Fun fact you could explore for later. As new money comes into your income sheet you could actually be assigning that as manually entries in the TRACK sheet assigned to a specific goal. You can then see progress toward funding your currently-unfunded goal in the Goals trends. But that is completely optional. For pre-tax goals those manual entries do not impact your plan and only show up on the goals trends. You do not need to do this, but some people like the visual.

Again… I am not sure I understood your use case. If I did not and my videos do not cover it then I would be open to having you contact me directly for a conversation. If you want to do that just send me an e-mail to the mmm.expenseplanning@gmail.com address and I will send you my contact information.

Hope this helps!

Alex

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AutoCat Integration! :grinning:

I have not published previous release notes in this thread as they are available on the Download site (link on the first post above).

However, as there is a lot of Excitement about AutoCat for Excel, I wanted to provide an update directly here in addition to in the release notes:

  • The MMM Zero-Based-Budgeting tool incorporates its own powerful “Affinity” auto-categorization engine and rules table. However the Tiller team has recently released AutoCat for Excel. Tiller users therefore now have the option to use either AutoCat or Affinity in this tool in the now-downloadable version 3.7.1. This is provided as follows:

    • No AutoCat rules defined:
      • Behavior: Uses the Affinity engine to auto-categorize data imports (Existing).
    • AutoCat rules defined and set to “Run on Fill”:
      • Behavior: Uses Tiller’s AutoCat engine to auto-categorize data imports (New!)
    • Manual AutoCat Execution:
      • Option to Preview Manual AutoCat changes for a selected date range based on selection of either fill-empty or overwrite-existing. This preview shows the old value and the new value side-by-side only for impacted transactions.
      • Option to cancel or push the AutoCat changes to the specified date range.

There is not currently a video on this new feature. However, you can review the existing Affinity auto-categorization engine setup and behavior in the following video ( Simplify Expense Transaction Entry in Excel with Tools like Auto-Categorization - YouTube ).

For reference, the new Manual AutoCat preview/push setting (screenshot below) is now located below the corresponding Manual Affinity preview/push setting on the Affinity sheet. The video above is from an older version of the product and therefore does not show how the Affinity engine runs automatically on data import, and does not show the Preview feature (which can now be used with pushes from either Affinity or from AutoCat, depending on which you choose to use).

image

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Debt Elimination Planner

I have just released v5.00 of the spreadsheet today, and there is a major enhancement to the spreadsheet that I felt was worth posting on this thread. That is the Debt Elimination Planner.
Here is a link to the YouTube Video that demos it:
(Debt Elimination Toolkit using the Excel "Managing My Money" Spreadsheet - YouTube)

A new sheet DEBT_PLAN (the Debt Elimination Planner) is available after the GOALS sheet. It provides an extremely powerful and effective way to plan for debt elimination and to simulate the effect of different strategies on interest payment reduction and on the final Debt-Free date.

The tool provides the following features, which can assist in setting budget items for debt reduction for the current year.

* Model payoff of up to 20 debts
* Simulate payoff using the standard Snowball Method, the Avalanche Method, or a Custom Snowball method.
* View a Debt-Free date with each scenario
* View the effect of an extra budgeted monthly payment (you can try setting different amounts)
* View Charts showing the total overall principal balance, and individual balances, over time for a given strategy
* See the interest savings of each strategy, and of extra monthly payment amounts, over a simple minimum payment approach.
* Produces payment schedules showing the optimum placement the to-be-budgeted extra monthly payment (ie: which debt to target that payment to).

Once a payoff strategy and extra payment amount is determined you can add the monthly payments to the zero-based-budget on the next sheet (Expense Planning).

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Hi Alex,
Edit, I found the PW in one of your old youtube videos

When I try to extract v5.00, I am prompted for a password? Can you share the PW?

Thanks,
kra808

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The download link has 3 documents: the password protected zip file to download, the release notes, and an installation instructions PDF file. Follow the installation instructions PDF file. The password to extract is included in that document.

Let me know if you still have any issues extracting or installing it. You can directly e-mail me at mmm.expenseplanning@gmail.com

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hi @Alex.Mtz do you help people implement this? or can you refer me to someone who can help me with tiller and getting this all setup? pls email me at evan@medspaadvertising.com if so, thanks!

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Hi @jemmoa7. I am having the same problem. Can you explain some details how you were able to open this file? Thank you

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HI mz2004,
It turned out that the mmm excel file cannot be on a cloud service such as One Drive. I had to move it to a local file and all was well. This was a long time ago, maybe Alex has made modifications that allow you to have the xlsx file on One Drive.
Jim

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Thank you for the quick reply. I am trying to download it on my computer (mac). Do you remember how you downloaded it on the local computer. Seems that I am not able to figure that out. Thank you

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mz2004,

Sorry for the late reply. The issue may be that you are installing on a mac computer. This particular Excel sheet only works on Windows computers.

For those with Windows machines, the instructions to install with or without OneDrive are included in the “Installation Instructions.PDF” file which is contained in the original download link at the top of this post.

Alex

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Evan (@evanjshapiro),

I do not normally assist people with Tiller setup in general. This community has a lot of Tiller experts who can assist however! I have also seen other posts where people have discussed this type of request.

What I do provided is some well-documented installation instructions (pdf file in the downloads folder), and also about 20 YouTube videos (see link above) that have a lot of information from general overview of the sheet to how to use each individual feature in more detail. However, what I do offer to people beyond the videos is to answer specific questions/issues they have (after they have watched the relevant videos) via e-mail. Actually, answering people’s questions is a good opportunity for me to understand where there is a gap and to generate additional YouTube content. I also offer to add new features to the tool if something is missing that is within the scope of the intent of the tool. For all of this you can reach me at mmm.expenseplanning@gmail.com . However, as previously noted, I am not really set up to do general consulting on how to set up one’s finances. That is mostly due to bandwidth / limited time that I have available.

Alex

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This is a reminder that although I do not post here on all new releases and updates, the tool is updated at least quarterly. The link to the Download (which includes release notes showing changes) is included at the initial top of this posting. A new January 2024 version has been updated in the downloads!