I have my property/school taxes included in monthly mortgage payments. I am using Excel. Tiller downloads my typical bi-monthly payments. My mortage company just paid a property tax and it was reflected in my transactions update. As this same debit was managed within the normal monthly payments, should this single transaction be listed as a transfer? If so, assume it doesn’t matter there isn’t a clear companion negative transaction. Thank you.
Hi @dmelideo:
It sounds like your property tax escrow payment is being included in your downloaded mortgage payments. (Are you splitting that among their separate categories, BTW? 
) And then the property tax payment made by your mortgage company also showed up as another transaction. Is that the case?
If so, yes. You could apply the Transfer category to the bulk payment to prevent the impact of what would be doubling this payment on your budget. This is the lightest (but effective!) lift to keep track of your finances.
The accounting types reading this, though, are likely clutching for a paper bag to breathe into. This is because they are going to need to see these property tax escrow payments collected and then balanced off with the bulk payment. But that is more complex since, my suspicion is that all of these amounts in your transactions download are negative in polarity. (Is that correct?)
For our viewers at home who may be escrowing their own property tax payments and are itching to see this from an accounting perspective, simply create a category for property tax escrow and set aside enough each month in the category’s budget to cover the the anticipated payment(s). Then, when the payments hit the transaction sheet, apply these to the same line item and check for accuracy to see a 0 balance for this line at the end of the year. (Yes…even in the Tillerverse, debits can still equal credits.)
Best…
Hi Brad,
Thank you for the quick response. When my mortgage payment transaction is downloaded, I only see a single charge (P+I+E). Yes, the tax transaction showed up as a separate event. I would like the escrow payments as they occur each month but as you have correctly assumed, detail is not downloaded automatically, and I don’t think it’s worth the time to manage manual transactions to provide the detail I can periodically check on-line. I would be willing to setup a budget with negative values to accrue MoM until a tax event happened and then drive the aggregate category to a neutral position to eliminate doubling the expense. I will need to think about how to do this, until taht time I will apply a Transfer to the transaction. As I’m relatively new to Tiller, I am periodically pulling in annual transactions, therefore new to me. Appreciate your fast response. Have a great Saturday.
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