Hi everyone,
I have a few clients right now and I am really struggling putting together a financial model and budget to get my costs sorted out across the 3 client projects.
There are a number of sub-contractor expenses and software costs associated with each client. We’re also spending on ads so I’d like to factor that into the financial model.
I am looking for help with building out this financial model using Tiller money.
Would anyone be able to help?
Hi @nextlaunch: Welcome to the Tiller Community.
Many options here, and there are many in the community who may see a better way than I, but the simplest one I see is to create a tag for each client, and flag both income and expense transactions with the tags associated with the clients.
Splitting whole costs among the tags is also available to allocate costs as you wish. Simply select the same category, such as “Advertising” for all splits and add tags to the splits after splitting, assigning a client share to each.
On the budget side, I don’t see an easy way to create client-specific budgets that compare to client-specific transactions. In this scenario, these would be need to remain aggregated among clients; however, instead of static numbers on the Categories sheet, you could copy the Categories sheet and name the copy something else associated with your client, one copy for each client. Call these “Subsheets.” (Be sure not to change the name of the original Categories sheet!) Then use a sum formula in the original Categories sheet’s cells to call and aggregate the budgets across the various client budget subsheets with the sums for each month, each category. Again, Tiller still will only be able to see the aggregate activity against the aggregate budgets, but it provides a quick rationale for your aggregate numbers.
The one drawback is I don’t see an automated way to prepare cost-to-budget comparisons for each client. If you’re focused simply on cash-flow for each client and you’re using tags for each, the Tags report will help with that.
The Tags Report will group and summarize cash flow components by tag for you. You can see it here.
…and the Small Business Dashboard will give you a bird’s eye view across clients. Take a look:
Does that help? Its the best thing I can see to adapt a personal software tool for a business like yours.
No matter your solution, it is 135 times better to have your transactions pouring into your sheets automatically every day!
All the best with your business adventure! So cool. I’m jealous already.
Brad.
I zoomed with Cameron last night. He has a large sophisticated financial model in a non-Tiller sheet. He copied the foundation template into this model and then linked an account. He was getting errors all over. I suggested creating and linking up a Tiller sheet like normal and then using importrange to link this to his model. He will proceed as we discussed and reach out if he needs more assistance. Sorry for not posting this earlier. Blake
Great work!
Thanks, Blake.
Brad
@nextlaunch in case it helps, and you should also be aware @Blake you can connect Tiller Money Feeds to any Google Sheet and it will create the necessary sheets it needs to feed the data. By default the core data sheets it will create are Transactions, Balance History, and Categories (a version without the budget month columns like the one in the Foundation template).
So if you already have those sheets (or versions of them) you can tweak the names/columns in your existing sheet and then wire the feeds up with it. I’d recommend doing this in a copy of your existing dashboard first to make sure everything works correctly and then consider doing in the live sheet.
This may save you time trying to retrofit things into the Foundation template…
Here’s a guide with more details:
Thanks! I’ll work on this and share some updates.
Sorry if I’m too late to this but I really like @Brad.warren’s suggestion to use tags in your Transactions sheet— that seems like an appropriate place to track expenses to specific clients & projects. Technically a Client column makes sense (rather than Tags), but using tags may allow you to piggyback on some of the tag-driven solutions in the Tiller Money Labs add-on.
When I was consulting, I used the Simple Business Dashaboard that @Brad.warren recommended to monitor my business. It does a great job as a top-level overview with some helpful filters & views. You’d need to do some customization or create helper sheets to dig to a tag- or client-level.
In my consulting spreadsheet— in addition to all the core Tiller Money sheets— I added sheets to track:
I never really need client- or project-level budgeting so that is a new wrinkle.
Good luck.
How are you coming along?
I actually moved everything into Wave so I wouldn’t have to use a spreadsheet. It’s going okay so far. I’m mostly focused on organizing all my 2020 transactions now for tax time.