How can I use Tiller to organize for tax time?

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Learn how you can use Tiller Money and community built tools to help you get organized for tax time.

What we covered:

  • Getting last year’s transaction data manually into your sheet (if it’s not already there)
  • Basics of AutoCat to help you make sure your transaction data is categorized
  • Create a quick pivot table to sum up numbers for the year
  • Explore community built tools and workflows to speed things up

Resources

Demo sheet

Right click any tab and choose “copy to” to get a tab into your own Google Sheet. The Rule Builder one is probably the most handy for helping build AutoCat rules.

Click here to access a view only copy of the spreadsheet used in the demo

Recording

Q&A

I’ve been manually adding previous data from my bank accounts. What’s the formula or simplest way to order my transaction date from newest to oldest?
You can sort by the Date column in your Transactions sheet.

how do you import from other financial software (won’t name names!!!)? similarly to what you did directly from financial institutions?
Check out some of the options in the community-built Tiller Money Labs add-on for CSV formats that it can ingest and add to your Transactions sheet.

What would be the pros and cons of creating separate workbooks per year? Versus having all years of data in the same workbook?
If you separate the yearly data into different sheets you’re less likely to run into performance issues down the road due to a large data set, but then your data is in multiple places. The sheets, if you don’t have too many extra formula intensive solutions, can handle several years of data so there isn’t really a need to create separate yearly sheets unless you need more intensive dashboards.

How do I add the Tag column?
Here are the steps for adding the Tag column to the Categories sheet.

Is the Category Rollup the same thing more or less as the Pivot Table?
The Category Rollup report is different in that it will more easily give you the transaction detail right in a cleaner look. If you use the Tags in Categories sheet option you can also use the report to filter based on that tag rather than needing to remember and individually filter each category you wan to report on for tax time.

Can you have multiple tags per transaction?
For clarity, there are two approaches for Tags documented and mentioned here on the Community. Tagging transactions and tagging categories. In either case, yes, you can apply multiple tags to either a transaction or a category. You can use both approaches, but only the transactions tags show up in the Tags Report and only the Category tags show up as filtering options on the Category Rollup Report.

What’s the difference between cut and paste and using hover and drag to fill in dates or vendors when adding manual transactions?
Copy/paste is a little less error prone because of the way the “quick fill square” enumerates numbers and dates.

As someone new to tiller sheets I wonder how many viewing hours are needed with the videos before I am up to speed?
There is no minimum, and this really depends on your learning style. If you prefer not to watch videos you can review written content. It does help to have a basic knowledge of Google Sheets.

How do you separate years if you choose to do that?
Here is more content on our Help Center about how you would “archive” a previous year.

Does Tiller Money charge an extra fee to use the labs tools?
There is no extra cost to use the Tiller Money Labs add-on. This is a community-built tool. Everything in that add-on is supported in the Tiller Money Community.

I see you have an IRA account linked; what about other investment accounts? So we would name them as such under Type? Rather than expense, retirement or ___
I’d recommend reviewing this topic or this one on how to think about categories for organizing IRA transactions.

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