New Improvements to Tiller Money Feeds Key Feature

News & Announcements
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Originally published at: New Improvements To Tiller Money Feeds Key Feature - Tiller

We’ve been working hard to address some issues with the fill process in Tiller Money Feeds. The biggest one being timeouts for some customers using Google Sheets when trying to fill a very large amount of data combined with an already large data set and complex dashboards. This “fill crash” has been a challenging bug for many of our long time customers for a while and we’re excited to announce that we believe we have pushed a change that should address this issue going forward.

Please let us know if you run into new issues or odd behavior with the Google Sheets fill. We did our best to test rigorously before pushing this change, but there’s always a chance some edge case slips through.

More frequent fills

As a part of this initiative we also increased the frequency of the Auto Fill for Google Sheets from once per day to about every 6 hours. Keep in mind that some accounts still require you to manually refresh before the data is available in our system to fill, but this should make the data we can fill more timely.

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If you already have Auto Fill enabled the next time you Launch Tiller Money Feeds it should automatically switch your Auto Fill from the once a day to four times a day fill. You do need to launch the add-on or manually toggle Auto Fill off/on in order to access this update. You can read more about how Auto Fill works on our Help Center.

Excel fills are more robust too

As a part of this initiative we also made changes to the Microsoft Excel fill so that behind the scenes both platforms are using as much shared technology as possible. This makes it faster and easier for our engineers to iterate on one of our most crucial features. For most this change was not noticeable.

While we hope to one day offer Auto Fill for workbooks stored on Excel Online, we don’t have that as a near term priority and we are unable to automatically fill data into workbooks only stored locally on a customer’s computer.

Share your feedback

If you have any feedback or questions about this update, feel free to reply below.

Updated - December 5, 2024

Since pushing these changes to Google Sheets we have been monitoring the performance of the fills. Overall some customers experienced a decrease in the amount of time it takes for the fill to complete, others may have noticed a slight increase or intermittently slower fills, and for some the fill is still crashing. For most there was no difference. The primary goal of these changes was to address the crashing issue for customers with large/complex spreadsheets.

We’ve pushed new updates a few times in the last couple days to try and address the crashing and an update yesterday afternoon may have inadvertently caused an issue where data only partially filled and then a subsequent fill may have introduced some duplicate balances and/or transactions. We have since pushed a change that fixes that issue. We can’t determine how widespread this might have been and don’t have automated tooling built to clean up the duplicates at this time. However, you can revert to a prior version of your Google Sheet (from the File menu) and then fill again and you should not get the duplicates if you experienced this issue.

We still have some work to do to try and address the crashes and we’ll keep pushing it forward to try and improve that experience for our customers with larger more complex spreadsheets.

Thanks for your patience!

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This is great news, i was considering splitting my sheets for the new year and starting fresh due to this constant timeout issue not allowing fills to complete. Thank you for this work.

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Thanks @bentyre1 ! Please let me know if you find it’s still crashing on you with large datasets as our intent with this was to fix that specifically!

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Hmmm, I’m not sure how I feel about auto-fill every 6 hours. I kinda liked knowing the auto-fill happened at a predictable time when I wasn’t interactively using the sheet. I’m not sure I’d want auto-fill kicking off randomly while I’m in the middle of doing something with the sheet. How about adding some user control options?

Also, will Date Added be the user spreadsheet time zone or UTC? i.e. will a USA nighttime auto-fill have a tomorrow Date Added.

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Thanks for your feedback @Mark.S - I also was curious what might happen if the Auto Fill kicks off and someone’s actively in their sheet doing things. I know if the sidebar is open it will block certain operations. I’ll add a feature request for a user control around this. I do know that the 6 hour timing is decided by when you toggle on the Auto Fill so you could sort of control when it’s going to happen (and know/predict) by toggling the Auto Fill off then on at a time where the 6 hour intervals are less likely to disrupt your work in the sheet. E.g. If I toggle it on at 10:30 AM I’d expect it to run around 4:30PM, 10:30PM, then 4:30AM.

I don’t believe we changed anything with the dates/Date Added so I expect it will continue to work the way it has been working, but I’ll double check.

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Thanks for the work on this, @heather. While we’re discussing improvements to Tiller features, any chance we’ll get a Refresh All button at any point? Will Yodlee just not allow it? I’d actually have more use for that than auto-fills every six hours.

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Hi @dmetiller thanks for your feedback here. Not a button, but there is an API call we can make when you visit the Console that will automatically trigger a refresh of all your accounts.

Yodlee emphasized we have to set some limitations around this (e.g. available maybe only once every 4 hours) so as not to overload their systems, but it would at least keep you from having to click every button in the morning when you get online to check in on things. You’d still have to manually refresh any accounts that are not eligible for Auto Refresh.

We just learned about this feature of their API a month or so ago and implementing it was something up for consideration at our last dev cycle planning meeting but we chose other work instead. It’ll come back up at another planning meeting in the future for consideration!

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That would be pretty handy, it’s similar to how other apps will auto-refresh accounts when they are opened. Still needs a fill, of course.

I would like being able to schedule auto-refresh/fill - like auto-refresh 4am, auto-fill 5am. Then my data is fresh and ready for me to start the day :slight_smile:

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Oooh. Thanks, Heather. That sounds like it could be handy. Happy to Zoom into your next dev cycle planning meeting to advocate for prioritizing this. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I do not have or see the “Auto Fill” option on the settings page. I do I get this? Roger

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Thanks Tiller I’m happy about more frequent Auto Fills and the behind the scenes refactoring!

Ideally I’d like to Auto Fill on an external event i.e. after a successful refresh vs. on a schedule. I don’t know if Apps Script allows that? but more frequent Auto Fills is closer than not to “Auto Fill follows refresh” — I expect it’ll help me thanks!

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It’s in the Tiller Money Feeds extension settings, per the help link Heather provided.

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Thanks for the additional info and suggestion. Ultimately, I’d want auto-fill to not run while I’m awake :slight_smile: It reminds of the community feedback to not have auto-fill run when opening the extension.

Although I’m sure some people will like having auto-fill run more frequently, in the chance that an auto-refresh had new data. That’s where the user control options come into play.

When auto-fill occurs at USA 2am the UTC date is the same.
If fill occurs at USA 10pm then UTC date is tomorrow.
So, if Date Added was UTC before the change, it would become a problem after the change.

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Welcome @ROGFIT229 if you’re using Microsoft Excel this feature isn’t available. Does that help?

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I found the setting, I’m using Google Sheets. I’m good for now. roger

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I found it, thanxs, roger

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Thank you Heather and team for the new improvements to the Tiller Money Feeds. I appreciate all the hard work. I agree with @Mark.S about user controlled options (as much as possible). The ability to toggle an option that meets each users needs provides more flexibility around timing of the refresh and autofill. I also agree that the UTC date is not ideal and at a minimum causes confusion with reconsolidation and reporting. The date used for date added should be exactly that, the date it was added. I appreciate the open dialog and opportunity to provide feedback as input to potential changes.

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Thanks @heather for you and the team’s hard work to make these improvements! I am curious how it will go with filling during the day too if we are in the midst of working in the sheet.

My personal experience over the years has been that a significant number of rows (typically in the Transactions and Balance History) and columns cause excessive slowing in the sheet at some point. I have no hard evidence to support it, but my conclusion for my own personal case has been that the most fruitful efforts have been in reducing the overall cell count more than anything else. My work on that seemed to eliminate performance issues for me more so than the effects of removing complex formulas or other suspects like volatile functions and conditional formatting. It doesn’t even seem to matter if the rows and columns have data because I suppose Google still has to allocate backend resources and has to do certain processing for the whole thing in order to ensure data backups.

I also think it’s possible that I’m an edge case here which is ok, but thought I’d just mention it. I have a search feature in rows 2-12 of my Transactions sheet. I had created a community solution for it but it’s possible that I’m the only one that uses it. If there’s no way to modify it on my end, I’d like to note that or retire the post. It uses dates like _00/00/0000 which I’ve found do not collide with any other reports or templates that I use. When I did a manual fill today it appeared to add the new data starting row 2 by inserting new rows there, whereas I think the old methodology was to insert the data at the bottom and then sort the dataset descending by Date. When I ran it with my search window in place, it errored out with "Update Error - Failed to update Transactions with Error: “Exception: Service Spreadsheets failed while accessing document with id…”. Additionally, it got stuck in a loop adding thousands of rows at the bottom, 500 rows at a time. After I removed my search rows, it filled 1 new transaction at the top by inserting a new Row 2 and finished successfully.

Tiller’s official position is likely not to put anything beside the transaction data itself in Row2 and beyond and I can respect that. Perhaps one solution would be to look for the first row with a valid date and then insert the data before that row. Like I said though, I’d understand not messing with it if I am the only user that is working that way with the transactions sheet.

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Im not sure how my autofill has been going since the change, the transactions seemed pretty much up to date with a few exceptions, and with the 1st manual attempt since the change it successfully added in about 4 transactions which seem to be all there is to add at this time. The tiller money feeds add on still got hung seemingly in the balance history updating though. I let it spin for about 25 min before giving up. Oddly i noticed when inspecting this a bit further that since 11/16/2024 it seems like a single account i have at fidelity has been adding in almost daily balances since the account inception back in 2022. (About 800 rows of data for each day so about 4800 rows total) I only noticed this because the balance history sheet hasnt sorted since these fills either. I’m not sure if this one account and excessive balance history from it may have caused the crash this time or what.

Looking a bit further i notice there’s a fidelity institution outage currently that may be causing this behavior as well?

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Is there a way to have Autocat run as well?

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