I am currently just adding an empty line and fill in the data under the “transactions” tab, but is there another way to do this?
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, @chetan47.
That is a good way to do it. We have this guide on the help center about tracking cash transactions.
I do the same thing as you, insert a blank row on the transactions tab. So that you do not have to remember all of your cash transactions, I have a cash spending sheet on my phone that links up to a cash tab in my Tiller sheet. When you spend cash, you take 10 seconds of time and enter in the data to your phone and it auto populates the cash tab. At your convenience, view the cash tab in Tiller and transfer the information to the transactions tab as you already do. I set this up long ago but Heather can direct you to an information guide as to how you can set this up for yourself. I have the cash spending tab on my wife’s phone too.
That’s a great idea. One thing it will still lack, is the “account” tab will not auto deduct from a “manual cash account” for what was manually entered on the “Transactions” tab.
So currently, this is what I do:
- Update transaction tab with manual entry
- Update total value of the “Cash Expense” account that was manually created.
This way I know how much Cash I have on hand and where I spent.
@chetan47 - we still have this documented over on the Help Center for the mobile cash tracking form.
One day we may have a way to update balances based on adding manual transactions directly in the Tiller Money Feeds add-on or perhaps someone in the community will beat us to it 
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Questions - How many of your transactions are cash? How many cash transactions a month? Do you use credit cards? Do you and can you pay off your credit card balances every month? Are you very responsible with your money? Do you have a good credit score? If you want to answer these questions and depending on what the answers are, I may have a few suggestions/ideas that you might be interested in.
@chetan47, if you provide answers I might have some ideas that you might be interested in. If not, that’s fine too. Thanks!
Hi Blake, on average I have about 4-5 cash transactions a month. I do use CC and pay it completely off monthly. I am responsible and with an excellent credit score. I am up for any suggestions.
Expanding on @Blake’s suggestion about tracking cash transactions on the phone:
I set up a Google Form for Cash Transactions that feeds my Cash Spending sheet.
This is much easier than typing into the sheet on the phone.
Here’s some more info on setting up a Google Form:
Thanks @jono. I will try this out. Looks like a better way to manage, as it is hard to remember the transaction if not entered immediately.
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Jon:
@chetan47, I should have used better terminology but I do exactly what you are saying which is exactly what is described in the article that Heather refers to. Yes, it is a Google Form. Once set up, it only takes about 5-10 seconds to enter in the information. That is why it is so good. The idea is to do the Form at the time of the transaction. If you wait until later, it will never happen. The information you enter into the Form populates into a separate cash tab in your Tiller sheet. Then, at your convenience, you can take that information and do with it whatever you need to. I have this on my wife’s phone. It is simple. If it was not simple, my wife would not do it. It’s seemless, no need for pen and paper, and nobody nowadays is more than 1 second away from their phone. Hope it helps. Thanks.
Glad that’s what you are doing @Blake. Yes, that system works very well.
Very easy to use and remember.
I also have a column in that Cash sheet generated by the form that let’s me know Y/N whether I have added the cash transaction to the main Transactions sheet.
@chetan47, In general, the thought here is to run all your expenses through credit cards to leverage their sign up bonus offers which are paid in points or cash. Be sure to understand the impact to your credit by signing up and cancelling credits cards. I like the ones with no annual fees (or where the fee is waived in the first year). Do not engage in this unless you pay off your total credit card balance every month. I have never ever paid less than the total amount of my monthly statement balance. Of course, you need to spend enough to make this worthwhile to pursue. Refer to the following website, which deals with more than just credit cards. Take a look at the rest of the site to see if anything else might work for you.
An example - About 6 months ago I asked my 25 year old son if he wanted to make $500 by doing virtually nothing. Of course his answer was yes. He has excellent credit. So do I.
So, we both signed up for a Capital One Savor card and we were both approved. The sign up bonus was $500 cash if you spend $3,000 on the card in the first 3 months. We both met the spending requirement and each received our $500.
As always, proceed with caution. Please let me know what you think. Thanks, Blake
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I’ve done something similar to this. I have a personal loan and set it up so I have a liability called “Personal Loan” and whenever a transaction is categorized as Personal Loan the value of that transaction is deducted from the balance.
I did this by going in the Balance History tab I added a line with the following information (note that the row this is on is 69, adjust cell references for your row):
-
Date, Month, and Week are based on the date of the most recent transaction.
Date =MAX(filter(Transactions!B:B,Transactions!D:D=D69))
Month =date(year(B69),month(B69),1)
Week =date(year(B69),month(B69),day(B69)+(1-weekday(B69))) -
Account number is just a random number
-
Account value is [starting value]+sumifs(Transactions!H:H,Transactions!D:D,“Personal Loan”). Check columns referenced because I added some in my Transactions tab. I had to do a little math at the start to back out my starting value because not all the transactions from the life of the loan are in my transaction tab.
I am new to Tiller so probably the next time I make an ATM withdrawal I will set up a “Cash on Hand” account in a similar way that gets deducted from when I mark the account as “Cash”.
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So to clarify, if I’m tracking an account manually (in my case, a bank with very poor online services) then I would need to enter rows in the Transactions sheet and ALSO update the Balance History sheet? If so, that’s unfortunate…
Yes, in the perfect world you need to enter both. However, the balance history is only relevant if you care about net worth. Most people are very concerned with their P&L which is the transactions. Net worth is less of a concern. If you do not care about net worth, then forget about updating the balance history tab. Even if you are interested in net worth, the balance in the bank account you mention might be immaterial in the whole scheme of things. For example: If your net worth is $250,000 and the balance in that bank account fluctuates between $0-5,000 at any given time, then you might say I am not going to invest the time to manually keep that bank account balance accurate because I do not care whether my net worth showing in Tiller is off by $5,000. You might say I do not care that my net worth showing in Tiller is $245,000 or $255,000 when in actuality it is $250,000. Since time is the most valuable thing in the world, you might decide to invest your time in something fun instead of investing the time in keeping that balance in Tiller exactly equal to the balance of the bank account.
Blake
Totally agree with not wasting time! The bank in question is a local community bank that loaned us $150k for an investment property. So yeah, not having that in there definitely affects the assets/liabilities equation… I can obviously enter it manually. Or perhaps write a script that adds up the balance by reading from the transactions sheet…
Your local community bank might not be a lost cause.
See the attached (a couple months old now) as your bank might be in beta.
I am dealing with a small community bank like you are and they are in beta so hopefully sometime soon I will be able to link up to them.
Blake
, @cjwvest!
Right now, yes you would need to manually enter both transactions and balance history entries for the non-automated account.
We offer the option to manually add balances from the Tiller Money Feeds add-on now and there is an experimental tool from Tiller Labs that allows you to add manual transactions.
I also wrote up a workflow that’s a simple formula to help you see the current balance of an account based on transactions.
Heather
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I can use some help on a related question: my teenage son builds up excess cash from various jobs, let’s say $200. He gives me the $200 in cash and then I transfer $200 from my checking account to his savings account. Any suggestions for how to account for this, and for the subsequent spending I do with that cash? Thanks.