Perhaps you’ve seen in the Memo that @heather has been gauging interest in a Tiller “Builder’s Office Hours” session.
The concept is to workshop a few personal-finance workflow & dashboarding concepts in a live, interactive webinar. Our plan has been to build a theme for the webinar around challenges that are top of mind in this community.
If this format interests you, let us know below:
Questions or functionality you’d love for us to answer or demo live
If you have a partially working solution in your Tiller spreadsheet, what is the missing piece for you to finish it up?
Are you most interested in learning about Google Sheets or Excel?
Would you consider sharing your solution in the community when it is finished?
If there is sufficient interest, we will schedule an event in the coming months.
Hi @randy,
I’m definitely interested, the difficulty is that I have very little time I would actually be available for something live. To answer your questions:
I’d love to have someone walk me through how the formulas in the budget dashboard (particularly the Savings Budget) work. I think I understand all of the pieces, but I haven’t really spent time making dashboards and it would be nice to see a quick overview of where the data comes from and how it’s related.
It’s not exactly what you’re asking about, but I’d like to continue the conversation started here: Tiller Money Labs Roundup 2/2/21 - Savings Budget Improvements - #16 by matt regarding possibly adding another category or time period to the Savings budget. I keep meaning to try my own implementation but haven’t gotten around to it.
I’ve built an elaborate display tool on my own website that uses Tiller/Google Sheets as the aggregator and API for the financial data. I think this might be too advanced for what you’re talking about, but if you ever want to do an Advanced Workshop, I’d be happy to participate. In particular, I think a quick overview of how to use the Google Sheets API with Tiller could be helpful to some people.
Presently, updates from the add-on are written once and never touched again. This approach improves performance and reduces the risk of data conflicts. We are exploring ways to implement a sync capability that would allow the add-on to update data already written to the spreadsheet if the information from the financial institution changed (e.g. a transaction cleared from pending or the tip were added to a transaction at a restaurant or a duplicate was erroneously read by our data aggregator).
This capability is on our roadmap but is still a ways out yet…
So, as far as your suggestion about “pulling in pending transactions” goes, unfortunately, we don’t currently have production tooling that can get this data into a spreadsheet for you. And without the data in a spreadsheet, there isn’t much we can do from a builder’s perspective.
From a technical standpoint I have my own hobby website hosted on a cheaper shared server (with few hits, it works fine for my personal purposes). I coded my ‘money tracker’ in PHP, I use Tiller and GoogleSheets to aggregate my data, and then I store the local data in MySQL.
When I load my tracker webpage, it checks if it’s been 24 hrs since I last checked GoogleSheets since I don’t want to keep checking it for the latest data (it’s slower, as you would expect from a free service, and it really only changes daily anyway). The page also checks the stock values from the previous weekday using the RapidAPI Yahoo finance API (I use that to show what portion of my wealth gains YTD came from different stock performances).
Once I have data in hand, it lets me display pretty much whatever I want using CanvasJS. I have a graph that shows my net wealth over the past 90 days, another that shows the same with a stacked line chart by the source of wealth (e.g. retirement, bank, high growth saving account), and another that shows the trend line of my discretionary spending by pay period against the line of my budgeted pay period spending (if I’m above the line I’m overspent, if I’m below I’m saving).
Probably the feature I look at the most is a series of calculations about how much time I have to different aspects of financial independence. For instance, my tracker currently projects that I’m 0.4 years until I could never make another retirement contribution again and I could maintain a comfortable lifestyle in retirement, should I wait to take out anything until 55.
It would be very cool! A minor annoyance with this system is the dependence on refreshing the Google Sheet, before I can grab the data into the database. There is no programmatic way to trigger an update of the Tiller Google Sheet template. So for instance, when I refresh my Capital One every three days and it requires 2FA, the process is: Follow link generated on my website to Tiller → Refresh Capital One (takes a little bit to load) → Refresh Tiller template on Google Sheets (also takes time to load) → click link on my website to check Google Sheets for new data. Would be much simpler if I could skip the part where I need to manually refresh the Tiller template on Google Sheets.
I think reviewing a popular, existing template (like the Savings Budget) is an interesting idea, @matt. I hadn’t considered that. It could provide some great fodder for Q&A and a jumping off point for discussions on alternative ways to structure & build templates.
If you can be more specific about what you’d like to build on the Savings Budget (in your second bullet), we might be able to make some progress on that offline (e.g. in a Show & Tell thread) or could turn that into an ad-hoc webinar.
@randy honestly I don’t really have any more specifics. I haven’t had time to dive in and settle on what I would want it to do. I just liked the concepts. If I do start to work on it, though, I’ll definitely put it up in Show & Tell.
Thanks for the response @randy! Definitely makes sense about what you’re saying. It’s really the only thing I feel like Tiller is lacking but it’s not a deal breaker for me. I’ll keep on using Tiller and will be happy when this feature is one day released
Thanks for your patience and enthusiasm, @mcentire08. Advocating for features like a user-accessible API in the community is a great way to get them on the product team’s radar.
We do discuss implementing such an API when we do roadmapping a few times each year. Unfortunately, it is not prioritized at this time.
