How can you view an isolated hidden category for "balance" purposes? (re: reimbursable work expenses)

Hi all,

I did a fairly thorough search and couldn’t find a simple solution to this question, but I apologize in advance if it’s out there in the community or other resources and I’ve missed it.

Situation: I work in a position where I regularly book travel and incur other expenses that are reimbursable, and I pay for these on a single, personal credit card that is largely, but not exclusively, used for these reimbursable expenses.

Currently, I have a single, hidden Tiller category called, “Work Expenses” that I apply to every single expense for work that I incur (I do not have any interest or need to track flights v. hotels v. meals).

I also have a hidden income expense called, “Expense Reimbursement” that I use when I split my paycheck (with all forms of taxes, deductions, etc.) because my reimbursements are attached to my regular semi-monthly paychecks.

Goal: I am seeking a way to easily see the sum of my hidden “Work Expense” category over a given period as well as the sum of my “Work Reimbursement” category so that I have a sense of how much reimbursable expenses are outstanding, yet to be paid. The goal is to mostly make sure I don’t miss any expenses, and I’d like to do this in Tiller as a “gut check” to make sure that everything seems in order.

Note: I do not want to track these work expenses and reimbursements as “non-hidden” items in my monthly budget because I do not want my work expenses to be at all reflected in my budgeting (since they aren’t my spending :smile: )

My ask: Does anyone know a simple way for me to achieve the above? Is there an existing community template that I might be able to re-purpose for this goal?

Thanks in advance; this community is awesome and has made it very easy for this new Tiller user to quickly get a handle on it all.

Cheers,
Jeff

Welcome to the community!

I believe there would be a few options depending on what you may like.

Tags would be one option but would require an additional step to tag each transaction with something similar to the category. Then you could use the tags report to compare the two.

Or what i would think would be ideal and i believe is an option when creating the report is to make a category rollup report and include the hidden categories in the report this would show each transaction that is under that category and totals.

Another one would be to categorize the expenditures the same as the income so that when equal to 0, it would be all paid up, if negative your work owes you that amount, a downside to this may be that you would have to temporally unhide the category to view totals in current reports and the current categories may need to be edited.

Also, pivot tables would be an option as well and you can filter out your other categories and sum the categories you’ve currently got in place

Look at this older topic: User Request: Detailed Category Tracker

I think it will do exactly what you are looking for. It allows you to select “hidden” categories for review.

If you just want to track and see how off $0 it is, you can add the Transaction Tracker for Google Sheets to your sheet. Then, select Work as the category and unfilter hidden.
However, you might want to consider not hiding these. I do similar and have a $0 budget, but they are valid expenses and then valid income that I do want to see tracked. If I report on just that category, then it should be 0.