I love seeing this as a priority for Tiller. As others have mentioned, not being able to track savings goals is Tiller’s biggest shortfall.
I like that the template projects when goals will be fully funded and overall, I think it’s easy to make sense of. The “Progress” part for money already spent isn’t intuitive to me. I’d see that and think that that’s how much I’ve saved toward that goal, not how much I’ve already spent. It may just need a different label.
The biggest thing I’d encourage you to think about is the savings goals for what I call “Everyday Expenses”: predictable but irregular expenses throughout the year. For me, this category encompasses 13 “sub-categories” (semi-annual car insurance premiums, quarterly life insurance, clothing, gifts, summer camp, annual tuition deposit for the kids’ school, etc.). These are things that I have a pretty good idea how much I’ll spend (or at least how much I’m comfortable spending) annually, but while I might spend $1200 on clothes throughout the year, it’s not going to be in $100 monthly purchases. So I look at all those kinds of things together, figure an annual budget for them, and then break that annual budget into monthly savings goals to make sure that when those expenses arise, I’m covered. I also have several savings goals like your examples, but my Everyday Expenses must be funded before, say, Vacation, and it’s always ongoing. There’s never going to be a moment when I’ve “met” that goal.
The way I make this work in Tiller is I list out those “Everyday Expenses” as categories and I try to estimate what I’ll actually spend and when (so, for Kids’ Clothes, I know it’s going to be 2 big purchases, one likely in June and one likely in October–not the monthly amount I need to put aside to cover those). This is what’s reflected in my Budget and how I categorize on my Transactions sheet. I also have categories for “To Savings for Everyday Expenses,” and “To Savings for Other Goals” which show up as an expense and that captures what I’m actually transferring to savings for those expenses each month. When I need to draw on that money, I have a From Savings for Everyday Expenses income category. I unlinked my savings account, so the transfers only show up once on my Transactions, eliminating the problem of zeroing out transfers. If it’s going to Savings, I technically want to count that as an expense and if it’s coming from Savings, I want to count it as income. This means that in those months where I do have those big expenses, I show an equivalent increase in income. The “To Savings for Other Goals” category is how I get around the proliferating categories problem you mention. As my savings goals change, that category will remain the same.
Then I created a separate tab for Savings Categories. That’s where I track the monthly contribution toward those everyday expenses, plus whatever additional savings goals I have. So in the Kids’ Clothing example, my Category tab (or what I renamed to Checking Categories) would show $600 in June and $600 in October but my Savings Categories tab would show $100 each month. This gives me the flexibility to see when I expect expenses to actually hit (on the Checking Categories tab) AND how much I need to put aside each month to prepare for them (Savings Categories tab). And this is also where I give names to those other savings goals, like Vacation, Home Upgrades, etc. so I can track those “To Savings for Other Goals” transfers to what those specific goals are without cluttering up my Checking Categories.
Finally, I created another new tab called Savings Budget. This requires some manual updating since I don’t know how to code things but it’s set up similarly to the Monthly Budget tab and once I set it up actually updating it doesn’t take long. I have my high level savings goals, along with all the sub-categories from Everyday Expenses, and track how much of my current savings account balance is earmarked for each one, what I’ve budgeted to add to each one this month (the Savings Categories tab), what I’ve spent from each one this month (so what I’ve pulled out of savings to cover those costs), and the new Available Balance. This is key for me. I’ve regularly transferred money to savings for those everyday expenses for years, but then I never knew how much of what was there was really for gifts versus how much needed to be held back for summer camp or whatever. I can look at this instantly and know if I can really afford to buy that dress or if all the money in my savings account is already earmarked for other, more important, purposes. Or if I really want to buy that dress it means I need to cut back on how much I have available for fun outings like concerts.
Essentially, everything I’m saying here boils down to any template for savings goals needs to be able to show me the same information for my savings account as what the monthly budget does for my checking account: of the money in that account, how much is for Goal X versus Goal Y? I’m much less interested in what my total savings goal is across all goals and how I’m tracking to that total. I suppose it could be enlightening to see what percentage of my total is earmarked for each goal (like the X% of budget line on the Monthly Budget)–it might encourage me to re-think how much I’m setting aside for more frivolous categories and could help me model scenarios like if I reduce my Clothing budget by 25% and put that towards Home Upgrades, how much sooner do I get there or how much more remodeling can I do, or something like that.