How to track bills paid with credit card

hollisblank2012 · August 17, 2023, 3:44pm

I auto pay a lot of my bills with my credit card but want to see how much I’m spending each month for example cell phone or t.v. subscriptions. How to go about that

susandennis · August 17, 2023, 3:51pm

The easiest way is to set up categories (categories tab) then assign gorize each transaction (transactions tab) and then there are a bunch of different kinds of reports you can use to see how much money you are spending per category. My favorite is Category Tracker Report.

hollisblank2012 · August 17, 2023, 3:57pm

I categorize my c.c. payment as a transfer. If I then go through my c.c. bill and break down the different categories inside (but have already paid the c.c. bill) I don’t believe that would give an accurate account of my cash.

heather · August 17, 2023, 4:47pm

Hi @hollisblank2012 - is the credit card also connected to Tiller and pulling the transactions as you’re spending into your Transactions sheet? If so, then you would categorize each of those transactions based on the type of spending (groceries, utilities, etc) and still categorize the payment (both sides) as a transfer.

From there you will be able to see how much you’re spending in each category on the Spending Trends sheet, Monthly Budget, or as @susandennis’s suggests, the Category Tracker.

If you’re looking to understand how much money is available to you to spend knowing that X amount is going to go toward your credit card bill at some point in the future, the Balances sheet can be helpful with that as it will show you your “Net Worth” (i.e. Assets minus liabilities) - that’s not a perfect solution though because you may have other accounts connected that would affect that number.

Sometimes what I’ll do is temporarily hide accounts that aren’t cash/credit accounts on the Accounts sheet using the “Hide” column to get a better sense of what’s available on the Balances sheet by looking at the Net Worth that’s only factoring in cash/credit accounts.

Hopefully that helps!

hollisblank2012 · August 17, 2023, 4:58pm

Thank you! and @susandennis. I got it now!

dmelideo · August 19, 2023, 1:52pm

I also pay most of my monthly bills using a cc unless the account charges a service fee. I then pay the cc off periodically off during each month to keep my credit utilization low and not affect my credit score. In fact, if I make a big purchase, I will make a payment same day to achieve the same net-zero utilization impact. Credit card statement and payments from my bank are reflected as transfers. I use the Category Tracker to make sure my transfers net zero $ which means my bank account has a payment transaction out which aligns with my cc statement payment, will be briefly not equal to zero until both transactions are in Tiller. This also means I have a “Transfer” category. I spent a bit of time organizing my annual spend into categories and subcategories. This way they are grouped together in the reporting tabs.
Examples pasted below. Tiller wouldn’t let me paste a picture. Note, paste automatically adds a “I” before and between each of the category sheet columns. Each row below is actually three columns. Sub-categories are denoted with a ": " between category name and sub-cat name. Sub-categories are in column A of my Excel sheet.

CategoryName
CategoryName: sub_cat_name

Actual Examples below:

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How to track bills paid with credit card

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