Mint style dashboard?

[mkozlows]

Mint refugee here. I love the concept of Tiller, and am set up well (better than I was in Mint) with categories and budgets and all that.

But what I’m missing is the “at a glance” summary view that I had in Mint. The information is all there – the “Budget” tab has almost everything that I’d want, as does the “Balances” tab – but there’s not just one headline page that I can look at.

Is this something that exists, or that’s easier to create than I’d think? (Looking at the contents of those two sheets, I feel like I’m at “learn spreadsheet programming” as a prerequisite to duplicating their functionality on my own. I was hoping I’d just be able to copy/paste a few formulas, but that doesn’t seem to be how they work.)

[diogo6]

hi there!

Have you considered/seen the newish “Spending Trends” solution?

I’ve made some additions/edits to my own, but that very ability is what I love about spreadsheets/Tiller.

Hope it works for you!

[mkozlows]

That’s a good one, but what I want is to get my balances in that same view.

It seems like it should be easy, but obviously copy/paste from the Balances sheet doesn’t work, and trying to reverse-engineer what’s happening on that sheet is surprisingly tricky.

(If the answer is just “get good at spreadsheets or it’s impossible,” well, that’s the answer then. But I’m asking if there’s an easier one.)

[heather]

Great question @mkozlows and welcome! There isn’t an out of the box solution I’m aware of combines Balances & Spending Trends. It’s not impossible, but definitely would take some customizing to get it there.

Would you want to see ALL your account balances there or just maybe up to 3? The reason I ask is because it gets tricky to add something like account balances with limited space, especially if you have dozens. If it was just the top 3 by transaction volume, that’s a lot easier.

[mkozlows]

So what I was envisioning as a low-effort Mint-replacement lift was basically a two column spreadsheet, where the left column was the existing “Balances” sheet restructured to be one column instead of two, and then the right column was a simplified (or not, if it’s easier) version of the “Monthly Budget” sheet. In other words, just taking all existing functionality and slightly restructuring it to present it in a more “all in one place” way. (And since they’re side-by-side the vertical variability shouldn’t matter, as nothing would overflow anything else.)

That said, talking through this, “do basically exactly what Mint did,” while a good place to start for doing a low-effort migration for Mint, probably isn’t the ideal place to end. If I think about what I really want, it’s probably something that’s tweaked and personalized to be customized in ways that wouldn’t be useful to anyone else, and so “figure out how to do this spreadsheet stuff” is probably where I land in the end, ugh, and the existing two-sheet system, clunky though it is, does have the information to carry me through until I figure out how to build a one-pager dashboard with all the relevant information surfaced.

[bentyre1]

I’ll admit I’ve used mint but not with regularity enough to know the screen you’re referring to, however when reading the original request, the Business Dashboard seems to come to mind for me. You may want to check that out, it has the balances listed on the left like i believe you’re wanting with other selectable options that show you different information based on your data.

[KyleT]

Hi @mkozlows, welcome! I thought I’d chime in to say that the learning effort will be well worth it because you can fully customize how you want your data to appear. And you can start out simple and grow in complexity as you learn more.

Building off some of the ideas mentioned earlier, I made a copy of the Spending Trends tab in a test sheet of mine to see what it would take to add some columns on the left that simply mirror the Balances in the manner that you suggested.

I highlighted column B, right-clicked and “Insert 1 column left”. I did that 3 times until I had the required room.

In Cell B13, I entered the formula:

={{Balances!B7:D20};{“”,“”,“”};{Balances!F7:H20}}

This is a quick and easy way to replicate the Assets and Liabilities from the Balances sheet and puts a spacer array in between. The main disadvantage to this approach is that you need to manually size the rows as your accounts change. So here I have it going to row 20, but if you have more accounts and account groupings, you would find yourself having to change this - maybe not that frequently, it depends on your individual situation. But that might be all it takes to get started - then you could take some time and think about how you really want to see it after some usage.

There is a little more complex alternative that would automatically size it by replacing the “20” in the formula with a more dynamic formula that determines the last row in the Balances sheet. It uses the MAP function to grab the maximum row number from the Balances sheet on each side, Assets and Liabilities.

={{INDIRECT(“Balances!B7:D”&MAX(MAP(Balances!B1:B,LAMBDA(val,IF(val<>“”,ROW(val),0)))))};{“”,“”,“”};{INDIRECT(“Balances!F7:H”&MAX(MAP(Balances!F1:F,LAMBDA(val,IF(val<>“”,ROW(val),0)))))}}

The last challenge here is that the formatting is not pretty. Initially it inherits this from the adjacent columns. This can be cleaned up and automated using Conditional Formatting but would take some more time. It could also just be cleaned up manually.

So you could go for something quick and easy at first and then make it more sophisticated as you go. Maybe that helps. Enjoy getting everything set-up!

[randy]

I like what you’ve done here, @KyleT— it’s simple, pulls all the data into one place, leverages existing formulas and assets, and is easy to implement.

I’m pretty new to the function myself, but you might have a peek at the VSTACK() formula to stack those two ranges rather than the array format… but what you’ve done works equally well.

Thanks for sharing!

[mkozlows]

Thanks, @KyleT ! That gets me to a really good starting place and gives me comprehensible hooks to look into to figure out what’s going on there and how I can tweak it.

(The Business Dashboard is also intriguing, and in line with the kind of thing I’m looking for, but not quite the right data, also an interesting suggestion.)