Net Worth, Cash, etc. - some thoughts

Google Sheets
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Been struggling w/ my normal account balance spreadsheet which I’ve been keeping in Numbers for many years now. It has moved between spreadsheet apps many times. Every once in awhile I forget to update at EOM and this causes headaches. But yesterday I could not find the most recent copy of this spreadsheet and had to estimate the last 4-5 months! This involves:

  1. stock history, new purchases or dividend reinvestments each month across three brokerage accounts
  2. Checking balance (pretty easy)
  3. Shares owned and EOM closing price of two different stocks
  4. Cash on hand estimate

I think I got it fixed, but this morning it occurred to me that Tiller has all my transactions, so …

Sure enough, the Net Worth tab/template has totals pretty close to my spreadsheet! I am not sure if I should just stop the spreadsheet, or just use the totals in Tiller and copy/paste them over. However, I do notice that some numbers are off a bit, mainly because Tiller’s balance doesn’t include the last-minute addition of interest and ATM fee reimbursements from Schwab. But May’s checking account balance was almost $3,000 low! Haven’t found any obvious issue there yet.

One other issue is Cash. I created a Cash account but haven’t been inserting manual transactions. Really all I will be tracking is Rent and Other, since I am not going to keep all our receipts for cash purchases since there are about 150 of those each month (we live in Mexico). Which makes me wonder if I should just remove the Cash item from most everything? Can ATM withdrawals just be transferred to ‘null’ ???

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Wow… a committed Numbers user!

I’m glad to hear that the Tiller balances came in handy. Let us know if you run to ground specifics on why some of the account balances didn’t match up. ($3k is a big difference.)

If you’re a heavy cash user, have you found any receipt/OCR/AI integrations that are helpful? This is pretty far out on our current roadmap, but I know there are some bootstrapped solutions that may be helpful.

Personally, for cash, I’d either create a Cash category and just accept that that covers a breadth of common expenses or try to split the ATM withdrawals into discretely-categorized line-items for specific things that I remembered.

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At this point I’m going w/ 2 cash categories - Rent and Misc. - I’ve analyzed our typical cash expenditures for a few months and have a good idea of where it goes (groceries, lessons, etc.) and that helped me firm up our overall budget, mainly for adding some $ to travel. Going forward the details aren’t so important for cash…

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Sounds reasonable, @dixonge. Let me know how it works out.

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