I broke down my subscriptions into two categories, one for video media (sling, netflix, etc) and one for all other subscriptions. I know my video category tends to grow and needs pruning more than the other ones.
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That’s a great point, @kingsdotter… I tend to use fewer, more-generic categories, but if you know you need to keep an eye on specific type of category for frequent pruning due to bloat granularity makes sense.
Fortunately the two tools are relatively similar, @wojo, but the Excel subcategory paradigm is a significant difference that requires a little attention. How is it going?
Great thread, I would love to do something very similar. One question: how were able to get three ways to categorize something. I would love to do this, but can’t figure out how to add a column. So, would love to have a “category” a “group” and then a “needs/wants/saving” column as well.
Now that I’m using Budget Plan my “fewer” categories is working better. I can glomp water, gas, electric, trash, and internet into one utilities, but separate them using the Budget Plan past-description functionality. Also, I use the Transaction Comparison tool to look at individual transaction in categories from some period.
I don’t yet have a full year of data so I have to do some work arounds when it comes to forecasting, but everything looks awesome so far.
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Hello,
I missed responding to your post. I added a group and sub-group under the category, and I used the link below to make it happen I wanted to have the ability to capture monthly obligations as a sub group, same with my investments.
https://help.tillerhq.com/en/articles/3137561-add-a-group-column-to-the-transactions-sheet
I hope this helps!
Nice! I have adapted the Johnny-Decimal file/folder numbering system to Tiller. I like it because it avoids having Groups and Categories with duplicate numbers. Something like this:
00 - Discretionary
00.1 - Restaurants
00.2 - Gear & Clothing
01 - Living
01.1 - Charity
01.2 - Groceries
etc., etc.
Theoretically you can memorize the frequently used numbers and just type those to populate cells. Not sure how this looks in other spreadsheet tabs…
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Fun & trivial question of the day 
:
Curious where others categorize Costco & Amazon Prime annual membership fees? I fully understand this depends entirely on your unique category structure.
After dissatisfaction with any single choice (Banks & Fin’l Fees - not really), Membership Arts & Clubs - not really), (Subscriptions Tools & Utilities - not really) I aligned them this way (and will do a saved split for their annual renewal transactions in the future).
SPLIT (Costco) Groceries, AND Auto Fuel - in my case 60/40
SPLIT (Amazon Prime) Subscriptions Media, AND Gifts AND Clothing & Gear AND Household Supplies & Misc - in my case 20, 40, 20 & 20.
Life is too short to be bothered by trivial matters.
Or, maybe not?
Yeah, this is a tough one. I struggled with it as well. In a crazy world, you’d probably divide the cost of the membership by the number of items purchased and weight it by the cost of each item, and then allocate the correct amount to each category. That’s much too far to go even for my level of detail craziness. In the end, I’ve been putting Costco into my ‘Food’ category, and Amazon into my ‘Supplies’ category since those tend to be the categories I spend the most for each, and the membership is most affecting the cost of items in those categories.
Nice to hear from you @jpfieber and I think your response confirms my overall stab at this ethereal task. I notice @Kathryn with her amazing comprehensive tracking has a Warehouse Club Membership category (nailing the Costco query)! Wonder where she placed Prime? @Kathryn?
Thanks for the exercise!
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I’m not super detailed with mine so i just add them to subscriptions but that split with costco seems interesting, we almost exclusively used costco gas this past year and it would most likely be like a 70/30 split opposite of yours for myself if i went that route. I may give that some thought. This probably won’t quite be the case going forward as we’re no longer living less than a mile from a costco. Unfortunately for the gas savings 
As far as Amazon goes, subscription currently is where it lands and I’m not too concerned on changing it up.
I’d be interested to see others viewpoints on this matter as well though, maybe it’ll make me reconsider amazon.
I track several kinds of Subscriptions because I am always trying new streaming and music services and I like to keep track of what I am spending in these (for me, ever changing trials) … it can get out of control! So that’s why I rolled with the split using Categories of what I actually purchase from these memberships access.
I’m hooking you up with 50% off your next Tiller renewal for having the community topic with the most views @hbwilliams22 (at least as of the time of your comment and probably still, I didn’t check). Thanks for creating an engaging post. It’s definitely something I’ve seen come up again and again in the coaching sessions I’ve been doing. “Am I doing it right?” 
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I log Amazon Prime to my “Streaming” category which is equivalent to your Media Subscriptions category. I don’t see any reason to break it down further. Reasoning:
- Anything purchased from Amazon is going to get logged as “General Merchandise” in my world. We buy a random assortment of things from them but its all mostly random non-recurring stuff.
- We are going to buy stuff at Amazon whether or not we actually have Prime and I suspect most people are the same way. If we can happen to get free shipping for whatever product it is that we need at the time because of Prime…then great. Otherwise, it probably gets purchased anyway.
Thus, Prime gets 100% allocated to my Streaming category since I watch a few shows on Prime. On that note, I’m way overpaying for what little I watch on it.