Hello, I’m new to the forum and Tiller Money but have found I really like it. I’ve used a spreadsheet for decades and decided it was time to get real time feeds integrated into my budgeting. I’ve tried several products including Mint and YNAB and neither worked the way my brain works. Tiller on the other hand, seems to fit very nicely.
That being said, I have a few questions about overall direction of product development. When I first stumbled on Tiller it was due to the Excel support of the program. I’m not a fan of `the cloud’ from a security standpoint (I’ve been in IT since 1983) and so having my spreadsheets in the cloud doesn’t sit quite right. As I poured through the forums it quickly became obvious that Google Sheets is the original and more supported tool when it comes to the very handy lab add ons. I’ve reconciled using Google Sheets for now, but will always yearn for Excel because a) I’ve used Excel for years and am fairly proficient with it and b) all my data stays on my laptop.
Excel support is in beta currently and that’s all good, but it does raise some questions:
If I decide to move from Google Sheets to Excel will I be able to without losing historical data?
Is the direction for Excel support to have all the functionality, including lab add ons, that Google Sheets has?
Will Excel development be on the same timeline as Google Sheets? In other words, can we expect added features/functions to be rolled out at the same time for both products?
These are good questions for the Tiller team. Based on my experience with them and using the product, I believe their primary focus is Google sheets and Excel is secondary. My sense is that Excel development will lag behind Google sheets development. Again, I will let the Tiller team elaborate.
Yes, you will be able to transition from Google Sheets to Excel without losing historical data, but it would likely be on you to manually migrate (copy/paste) your transaction and balance history data from gSheets to Excel. We don’t have any plans for an automated gSheets to Excel migration tool right now. Whatever is in our database (typically 90 days of historical data from the time you first connect an account and then daily accumulated data after that) could be automatically pulled into an Excel workbook, but it wouldn’t be categorized, would not include splits you did in gSheets, and would not include any manual entries.
We don’t intend to build add-on or Labs template/add-ons parity with Google Sheets at this time. We’re hoping that our community here will build and share great solutions for Excel. We will prioritize Excel features alongside other feature requests for the platform in general.
The development for Excel improvements/features does not happen alongside Google Sheets development at this time.
A little backstory
When we launched our beta in 2015 we started with direct to Google Sheets bank feeds fueled by our “Feed Bot.” After stabilizing the feeds we started building templates to accomplish specific financial workflows (budgeting, debt payoff, business, estimated taxes, automatic categorization) through a suite of add-ons.
Last year we released our Excel add-in beta integration with a simple annual budget template (similar to the gSheets Foundation template) and have slowly been addressing bugs as they come up.
This year, for various reasons, we decided an add-on approach to feeding financial data to Google Sheets was necessary so we started development on it early this year. We released the Tiller Money Feeds add-on on Aug 26th. At that point, we also released the Tiller Labs add-on to make our entire product set more modular and easier to try different solutions without needing to abandon your spreadsheet and start over if you decided a particular solution wasn’t a fit. The Labs brand allows us to quickly iterate on solutions without needing the rigorous development required of our core feeds product.
We moved the support for those Labs templates beyond our Foundation template to this community forum for a one-to-many and peer-to-peer support approach.
Hopefully that helps clarify and shed a little more context
Thanks for taking the time to provide such a detailed answer, Heather! You have clarified exactly what I wanted to know. Google Sheets is the primary focus and so that is what I will use.
I’ve spent a little time messing around with Google Sheets and the tool is more robust than I expected. For me this means I can customize the same (or nearly the same) as I would be able to with Excel.
I’ll just have to get over my security hangups with the Cloud. lol From what I’ve read, it sounds like what really is important isn’t stored on the cloud, so that is good news.
I personally use Excel (AND LOVE IT!) exclusively with Tiller. I used the Google Sheets version for a few things for quite a while before the Excel beta came out, because I think it’s a brilliant product and love spreadsheets, but only really committed to it when I could create my very own Excel spreadsheet and link it to the Tiller console (about a year ago I believe). There’s definitely not the same level of updates and priority for roll-outs in the Excel product, but I’ve been 100% satisfied with what I can do with it to manage every aspect of my finances.
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