Is anyone using Tiller on Investment accounts

Hi,
Is anyone using Tiller to connect to Brokerage accounts like Etrade and Schwab ?
I have connected the accounts but cant think of what I would do with this data.
I was thinking it could be interesting if one could track all Dividends received every month/year. Is any one doing this and if yes then how?

I created an investment only workbook to track IRA’s and 401k’s. My intent was just to be able to track balances at various points in time.

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I do track income and costs from two investment accounts - Ameriprise and Stoffel. Actually, track may be too strong a word :slight_smile: I poll each account daily and once in a while use Transaction Tracker to check on the income and costs.

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I have my eTrade account connected but I don’t have much transactional activity coming into Tiller from it due to the nature of what’s in it.

However, to track Dividends from that account you could use the Tag functionality and then create a report to find specific tags using a simple VLOOKUP and build something out from there. That’s the more manual, easy button way but there are certainly more complex ways to do it.

Example:
Create a tag called ETDIVAMZN
Create a new sheet with a VLOOKUP on that tag to pull all of your Amazon Dividends
Go from there

You could search on text that comes through in the Description but that can vary and might break.

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The Tiller feeds don’t have enough detail for investment accounts to be useful for me. I have accounts at Schwab and Vanguard in 12 different funds (target retirement, cash, etc) but Tiller’s feeds show only transactions and balances aggregated by institution. It is possible for a third party to get details per fund because I see it at https://home.personalcapital.com/ .

The Foundation and community spreadsheets have been very valuable and the automatic copy of spending works pretty well but I manually copy fund balances to keep tabs on how I’m doing for cash vs different kinds of savings within Schwab and Vanguard.

I connected our investment accounts for a while, but it created too much noise in my transaction list, so I disconnected them. However, since I want our investment accounts included in our net worth report, I added them as manual accounts and update their balances once a month. This way I can see the trend of our net worth and see our assets breakdown, including Retirement and Non-Retiremet Investments.

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Just a correction: Tiller feeds show transactions by institution and ā€œaccount.ā€ That account breakout is important because you can see for the same institution whether it is your or your spouse’s account, retirement vs non-retirement account. etc…

You are correct and we arrived at the same conclusion for different reasons. Tiller’s feeds don’t work well for investment accounts. They are noisy and for me Schwab Brokerage represents cash and different classes of retirement assets as different funds within a single investment account so they are aggregated within Tiller feeds. I do a manual update to a spreadsheet when I want something more bespoke than what personalcapital.com does automatically. Why I’m holding cash at Schwab Brokerage is a valid tangential question :stuck_out_tongue:

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I track investment accounts at Schwab, both taxable and tax sheltered, like IRAs. I categorize the dividends as an income category called Interest and Dividends, and if the dividends are reinvested, resulting in a second transaction, that transaction is categorized as a Transfer. I set up a rule in AutoCat for each security, using Polarity to distinguish between dividends received and their corresponding reinvestments.

If I buy or sell a security, I categorize it as a Trade, which is a type of Transfer, and the matching transaction representing the proceeds of the sale or the cost of the purchase is categorized as a transfer as well. As a result, Trades do not change my net worth.

Consequently I can track and budget dividend income. I use the Tag column in AutoCat to automatically tag dividends as Taxable or Non-taxable. This allows me to retrieve all these transactions for tax purposes, regardless of security name.

To make this work, you must make sure the Description that identifies each security is consistent throughout. To streamline this process, I keep a Sandbox tab which has a column displaying every unique Description on the Transactions tab {contains the formula =SORT(UNIQUE(Transactions!$C$4:$C))}. Periodically I copy this column and paste-as-values into another column. I use this second column of values as a data validation lookup for the Transactions tab, and any other location where I wish to choose the description of any existing transaction. This causes any new Description that does not match one of my prior, corrected transactions to get flagged by the data validation rule. I can then just pull up the data validation drop-down list, and choose the correct, harmonized security name. Sounds complicated, but in practice it requires very little effort and captures virtually all relevant transactions.

BTW, I apply this AutoCat renaming/data validation process to all common transactions, not just securities. The result is that instead of, for example, a different payee Description for each Whole Foods location, all Whole Foods transactions are described as Whole Foods. Searches and reports become much more concise. If I ever need the overwritten information (almost never, I find), it is still available in the Full Description column of the Transactions sheet.

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Thanks for sharing. My frustration is that the descriptions are not at all consistent. Some have the word ā€˜Dividend’, Some have Div while other descrption dont have either but the transaction is still a dividend.
I decided to not use TIller for tracking dividends and instead go to Schwab or to Etrade and get the dividend info from those sites.
I am Using Tiller only for budgeting and pulling in only those account which I use for spending money and nothing else. Networth tracking is much better in Personal Capital.