I’m new here, but I’ve been managing my budget in Excel for 30+ years. I’m a programmer with VBA knowledge so I’ve used that to build my own UI on top of Excel to categorize expenses and change views I’ll include some screen shots here and here’s a link to a writeup on the history of my “app”: tophermiller.com
What I like about my spreadsheet is that it does envelope (i.e. rollover) budgeting per category. This is the only kind that is intuitive to me.
This week I found Tiller. I loved that it could pull in my transactions from multiple accounts, a task that I had been doing manually twice a month. However, I almost rejected it because the Foundation Template for Excel doesn’t do rollover. But then I realized I could just use the feed to download my transactions into my own spreadsheet, and continue using my VBA UI for categorizing and visualizing them. This account linking alone saves me a lot of time, so I’m sold on Tiller.
All this is leading up to a question…Would the community appreciate if I were to spend the time to clean up my VBA-based envelope-style spreadsheet and share it with y’all?
Super cool, @tophermiller. I’m glad to hear that integrating Tiller feeds with your longstanding workflow is saving you time and making managing your money more enjoyable.
I’m curious about how you implemented the integration. Did you rework your old version of the “transactions” worksheet to match the Tiller conventions? Or are your feeds mapped to a temporary Transactions sheet with a manual-cutover step? (If you are familiar with the conventions, remapping a personal spreadsheet to be compatible with Tiller isn’t that hard but I’m curious the experience of new users giving it a try.)
Looks like you’ve spent a lot of time optimizing the UX on your solution and automating critical workflows. It’s cool.
Speak up, folks, if you’d like @tophermiller to clean this envelope solution up for a share…
@randy The Tiller add-in puts transactions into a sheet named “Transactions”. From there, the user invokes my VBA UI, which pulls available categories and subcategories from the sheet named “Budget” and pre-fills the form with date, amount, and vendor. You select your category and subcategory and submit the form, at which time the data is copied into a sheet named “Expenses”, with three-letter codes indicating the category and subcategory. This serves as the “database” source for the “Budget” sheet.
The “Budget” view is built with formulas that summarize based on those three-letter codes found in the “Expenses” sheet. Does that make sense?
that would be a huge asset to this community. i have been using Quicken for 10 years to run my bookkeeping, accounting and Tax reporting. recently it has become unusable so i am leaving quicken for Tiller. i was just looking for such a tool to enrich the data
