Filter Monthly Budget tab by Group

My daughter is away at college and we need to track her monthly spending. I have created a group “Abby” and assigned categories to it such as Abby Groceries, Abby Clothing, etc. I need to send her reports of her monthly spending against budget. The Monthly Budget tab has exactly what I need, but I need to filter it to just show the Abby group.

I’m happy to modify the tab and/or make a copy of it for this purpose, and am fairly familiar with various functions, although Array functions are sort of new to me.

Currently my work around is to temporarily hide all categories from reports in the Categories tab except the desired ones, print the Monthly :Budget tab, and undo my hidden categories - horrible kludge.

Ideally I’d create a new filter in cell H5 enabling me to show all groups or just one group. Alternatively I could copy the tab and make a hard coded change in a filter somewhere in the new tab - but I can’t figure out how to do either of these.

Help?

Hi @bbruck!

If I may suggest, have you considered using the Tags column to tag any relevant transactions as “Abby” or something similar? You can then use the Tags Report from the Tiller Community Solutions extension to generate an itemized list of all “Abby” transactions and a category summary: no spreadsheet hacking is necessary. You could even drop the “Abby *” groups and categories and use your normal budgeting categories if you wanted to.

Thanks @cculber2!!! If no one has a relatively easy way to filter the monthly budget report, I will try that. Unfortunately she has between 5 and 10 transactions per day. Sigh. Different issue not to be solved by Tiller!!! In any case I could use an if-type function in the tags column to auto-populate that column if the first characters of the category are Abby, I guess. Let’s see if anyone else has ideas.

Unfortunately she has between 5 and 10 transactions per day. Sigh. Different issue not to be solved by Tiller!!!

That is certainly frustrating! I wonder if this is something that could be handled by AutoCat. How are you categorizing your daughter’s purchases as they are imported by Tiller? Does your daughter have her own unique account (credit/debit card) for all of her purchases that you are importing from? If so, you could leverage AutoCat rules to assign the proper category and tag to each transaction.

Something else you could try that is a Google Sheets solution rather than a Tiller solution is to select the entire cell range of the Abby group on the Monthly Budget tab, select the Print icon or File → Print, and choose “Selected cells” from the dropdown menu. You’ll be able to print a hard copy or PDF or whatever output format you prefer.

Thanks Custis. I considered that, but the resulting report is a simple list. Since I’m trying to teach her budgeting, the budget by month tab is perfect with the graphs at the top. So far, my “fewest keystrokes” solution is:

  1. Categories tab: Hide top category and copy to end to hide reminder.
  2. Unhide top Abby category and copy to last Abby category.
  3. View/print the budget by month tab.
  4. Ctrl-Z 3-4 times to restore the Category tab.
    It’s a kludge but actually takes less than 30 seconds once you’ve done it a few times.
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If you open the Monthly Budget sheet and unhide the columns, you can filter out specific groups/categories. Take a look at columns Q/R/S. You should be able to filter out specific groups. On mine the hidden cats and hide from report are filtered out. You can simply swap and say group=Abby

-edit- Just verified and it does work. All you have to do is modify Q16 (that should be where the array formula is. And then just filter for the Abby group. In this case my query looks like:

=sort(filter({INDIRECT(K21),INDIRECT(K20),INDIRECT(K19)},INDIRECT(K20) ="Abby" ),1,false,2,true,3,true)
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Many thanks yossiea!

I duplicated the monthly budget tab and added the new condition in Q16 as suggested. I now have two monthly budget tabs, with all their features; one for us and one for Abby!