More than 200 categories?

Hello, I am a real estate portfolio manager with roughly two dozen properties. The built-in template limit of 200 categories isn’t quite enough to manage them properly. Can I get assistance on customizing the template so I can increase the number of categories to at least 600-800?

Thank you!

Hi @joshjberns,

Thanks for your question.

First, I would ask if you can re-think how you have your categories and groups structured so you don’t need so many categories.

What type of schema are you using right now and why do you need so many?

You can also create up to 5 sheets so if that’s helpful you could have separate properties on different sheets if the accounts you’re using are different between the properties.

Otherwise, which specific sheets are you trying to extend to include more categories?

Hello Heather,

Thank you for your response. Currently, I’m using about 10 categories per asset, plus all personal categories. However, based on your suggestion, I’m going to break up some of the real estate into different sheets. Thank you for the tip. This should get me by for a while until we start adding more assets.

Joshua Berns

The Categories sheet can hold as many categories as you want.

In terms of analysis, most of the templates have formulas that will work with large numbers of categories but often formula & formatting in key areas (both visible and hidden) in the sheet will need to be expanded down to accommodate and compute with all the extra categories. (If you make these changes and subsequently restore or update a template, your changes will be lost.)

We typically build templates for 200 categories because this is more than most users use and the in-cell processing for larger numbers of categories can degrade performance— something I’d keep in mind if you are committed to rolling with 600+ categories.

Good luck.

Hi @joshjberns ,
If you have the same 10 categories per asset, but are setting up a unique category for each of them [Asset - Category] , you might consider using just 10 categories for everything. Then, use the Tags feature to tag each transactions based on the individual asset.

Here’s some more info on using Tags:

The existing Tags report will provide some reporting options, but you could also create your own custom reports by filtering or searching on both the category and tag columns.

Then you wouldn’t need as many categories and you would get a quick overview of each main category.

Jon

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Hello, I have encountered a similar problem to what Josh was having above. I run a business and track many different income sources as well as expense types, and could use a few more categories than I have. While I have not yet found a restriction in the monthly budget summary, the all-important Yearly Budget tab does have a harsher restriction.

I discovered through manual effort EXACTLY how many categories the Yearly Budget can handle - 156. I wish it was 200 as has been suggested. I deleted category after category, watching the Yearly Budget numbers fill out the lower rows one by one, until the Yearly Budget automatically had every row filled. So, this seems an unnecessary restriction, because if I need to add a category I must find one to delete, or my Yearly Budget will not function properly.

It was suggested that I can “click and drag formulas for each column” to fill out the blank ones, but what I tried does not work, so I would need more specific instruction - like a blog or video. Another bit of feedback I received was that groups and categories have a relationship on this limit, so if there is something I can do to extend categories by massaging the number of groups, that help would be appreciated as well.

Thanks, Eric

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I experienced the same behavior today with the Yearly Budget sheet zeroing data for rows that are in excess of number of categories permitted. If I delete one category, the data appears (unhides) in the Yearly Budget row and gets added to the cash flow. I deleted more one by one and for sure the Yearly Budget sheet started filling in those rows that were zero’d before. So it appears there is a definite limit on number of categories permitted to display in the Yearly Budget Sheet.

We are working on supporting a higher limit of categories in the Yearly Budget and hope to have this in place in the next couple weeks. Then you can use the Tiller Money Feeds add-on to restore your Yearly Buddet sheet. I’ll try to circle back here when it’s available.

Thanks for your proactive feedback. I’m looking forward to it as its currently broken and only shows zero’s for those extra categories.

Thanks for your patience, @goyalu. We are a week or so out on this. The new build is in testing.

@goyalu we’ve got this change updated. You can use the Templates feature in the Tiller Money Feeds add-on to update your Monthly and Yearly Budget sheets to support up to 200 categories and 20 unique groups.

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