Impact of "Money in Excel" feature on Tiller

Hi everyone,

I just got an email today about how Office 365 is being renamed to Microsoft 365 which comes with a new feature called “Money In Excel”… essentially an Excel plugin that auto connects to banks to download transaction data. Looks like instead of using Yodlee, they’re using a company called Plaid to do it. Can do a Google search for articles and you’ll see the announcements.

Looks eerily familiar to what Tiller has been doing. :frowning:

I know Tiller has been mainly focused on Google Sheets based solutions and Excel is still in beta. I personally would prefer Excel given the wealth of options the desktop client has and their web client generally has full parity.

Will this mean more urgency for Tiller to support Excel or another data point to further reduce investment?

Mark

2 Likes

Here is more information -




  1. Launches 04-21-20.
  2. Cost is $6.99 or $9.99 per month.
  3. Money in Excel is a Microsoft 365 exclusive feature with no free tier available. So if you want to take advantage of this, you’ll have to subscribe.
  4. See the Money in Excel video half way down the page in the first link. It shows four tabs; Welcome, Snapshot, Categories, and Transactions.
  5. The explanation says “It will automatically categorize spending habits into different groups so that you can easily see where your money is going every month.” Based on my experience with Copilot (which also uses Plaid), the transactions are indeed automatically categorized by Plaid.
  6. Another example of anybody who wants to be somebody is getting into data aggregation.
  7. Includes many templates to chose from to personalize your file.

Cheers,

Blake

Mark, thanks for the post.

This is a huge validation for the uninitiated that spreadsheets are an amazing way to manage money. Not a fringe solution, but with Microsoft’s endorsement it’s a very mainstream solution. (Of course you already knew spreadsheets were great - but many people still don’t.)

As you know, we offer Google Sheets (our longstanding solution) and Excel (in beta). We are getting great feedback on Excel. Our product focus this spring is improving our core feeds across Google Sheets and Excel, especially with banks that are using MFA. We just released our new Account Summary, and more is in the works. As that work completes, we’ll review feedback on the Excel beta, assess next steps with Excel, and share more about our plans.

I smile because my job working on Microsoft Money in 1994 was the seed crystal that started Tiller Money. By 2015 or so, I was wondering… “why hasn’t the state of the art for personal finance evolved much since Microsoft Money circa 1994?” With that we created Tiller Money. So, welcome back Microsoft!

Our team is fired up with the founding mission that got us here. We want to empower people with great personal finance solution in their spreadsheets, great templates, a dynamic community (you are a big part of that), and a business that promotes the privacy and security of our customers’ data. All of this is in service to giving our customers more control over their money, their lives, and their futures.

4 Likes

Thank for the post Peter. I do worry that when a big company like MS steps in, there’s risk to the smaller startup. So knowing what are the key differentiators of Tiller would be great since just being a spreadsheet is no longer sufficient.

One area of differentiation that I can foresee is around privacy and security. I suspect that MS and Plaid like this solution because now they are one step closer to getting insight into their user’s financial data. This was the main reason why I stopped using Mint/Quicken because I just didn’t feel comfortable with them associating my user account with financial data.

I’m more comfortable with Tiller’s approach but think there’s value to further explain the security/privacy provisions you have in place. Or if there isn’t as much now, good opportunity to invest there. This is one of the benefits of old school MS Money (I loved that software). It was desktop software so you had assurance the data wasn’t in the cloud.

Mark

2 Likes

Privacy is a core value for Tiller Money, and we’re unique among fintech services in that the humans at Tiller Money don’t have access to our customers transactions and balances. We will be talking more about this in 2020.

Beyond feeds in a spreadsheet, we want to be a home for anyone who wants to meaningfully engage in their finances while leveraging the power and flexibility of a spreadsheet. For us, this means continuing to invest in our community, Tiller Money Labs, great support, webinars, AutoCat, and our daily email. We are also improving the performance of the 21,000 financial sources we support today.

We’re excited about what’s ahead this year. We’ve never taken our position for granted, and we’re continuing to move fast to build on what’s working and add value to our customers.

2 Likes

I’m looking forward to trying MS’s offering but I’m not terribly optimistic based on my experience with Plaid. Of the 30 or so accounts I track with Tiller only 1 is not currently supported. With Plaid based services, there are about 10 accounts that either aren’t supported at all, or don’t reliably connect. Based on that I don’t think Tiller has too much to worry about at the moment.

5 Likes

So i have been using the Tiller Excel addin. Today i downloaded the Money in Excel template to see how it compares. I have built out my Tiller Excel Spreadsheet using VBA so that it will autocat, breakdown my mortgage payment from a mortgage schedule. I have it working. I have found the data feed from Tiller to be reliable (in contrast with Quicken which was getting quite bad). I added accounts to the Money in Excel to see how it would work. I have Bank of America and Merrill Lynch which are owned by BofA. Well it downloaded the BofA data but so far has failed at downloading the Merrill data. It also had the Merrill Accounts under BofA which i suspect might have caused the downloading problem. So immediately i am encountering downloading problems. We will see where this goes. It also seems that Tiller kept their transactions and category sheets more customizable at first blush. I have to play around with that more. With Tiller I could make the transactions sheet a table and filter it easily which is really useful. Final judgement at this point, is that Tiller offers more flexibility. I wish Tiller had more template addons for Excel to work with.

3 Likes

Hi @ronnieK, I know this is an old thread. But I just noticed you said you “have built out my Tiller Excel Spreadsheet using VBA so that it will autocat.” This sounds very intriguing. Would you be willing to share your VBA code with us? I would like to get auto categories working in Excel somehow, as it seems TillerHQ hasn’t made any movement towards adding this feature, and I am trying to minimize my use of Google in general. Thanks!

1 Like

Sorry, i have not been here in awhile. I will work on figuring out how i can make my Excel spreadsheet a template and not compromise my personal account information. Then i would be happy to share my sheets. They are certainly not perfect and i had to learn VBA syntax and environment to get this done. (I knew other programming languages.)

Money in Excel is worthless if you have accounts at a brokerage that you use. It only works with banks. If all you have are bank accounts and credit cards, i suppose it will work for you. You will have to wait till MSFT updates Money in Excel to handle Investment accounts. It has been months now since release and they still have to addressed this. For example, all of my banking goes through a Cash Management Account at Merrill so Money in Excel will not pick up my spending.

Thanks for being willing to share. I agree about VBA. It would be nice if there was a way to use Jinja templates or Python instead for building this autocat lookalike.

1 Like

"Effective June 30th 2023 Money in Excel will no longer be supported.’ They’re getting rid of this. They’re partnered with Tiller on a 60 day trial which is helpful, unless like me your bank doesn’t work with Yodlee (which Tiller uses for data) but does work with Plaid (which Money in Excel uses)

:frowning:

I have been wanting Tiller to use both Yodlee and Plaid for a long time. Each one has outages for banks at different times, so If one of them had a long-term (many, many, weeks) you could possibly switch to the other one. I always wanted to try Money In Excel, but they only offered it to the USA, not Canada. I guess that’s OK, since they canceled it entirely.

3 Likes

Same. Here. I have brought this up several times

1 Like

Also, MX is a good integrator too.

1 Like

We hope to offer multiple aggregators in the future, and something we’re considering for this year, but it’s not a small lift!!

2 Likes

I am hopeful you and the team can do this! I had to cancel my sub as it’s been unable to sync my Bank feed for several months. Trying out competitors budgeting software that uses Plaid - sure the backend works but the software itself feels like working with one hand tied behind my back, and a boxing glove on the other hand :frowning:

I look forward to the day I can resub for a stable bank feed!

Sorry to hear you’re trying other tools, @seffy. We are constantly improving our bank feeds and Yodlee is always addressing outages of supported institutions. The “multiple aggregator” solution is on the roadmap but a ways out.

@seffy , I agree that it sucks that Tiller did not work for you. Take a look at Monarch. Not a spreadsheet tool, but still pretty cool and really pretty. And uses Plaid.

@randy Unfortunately It’s been a recurring theme with my particular bank, I can’t recall a time it’s worked consistently for more than a couple of months in all the time I’ve been using Tiller(for 6 years!).

I did try manually importing, but the guide I followed to setup the import was not as straightforward as it appeared, and I couldn’t get the formulas to format the dates working. A more robust manual import would honestly be enough to keep me around as a fallback.

@richl I took a look at Monarch on your recommendation. Unfortunately my bank doesn’t show up on their list of institutions.