Ok, no problem following install instructions, but the top row spending updates are all $0. Everything else populated accurately in the Insights and Assets/Liabilities/Net Worth correctly. (Photo attached)
Love this new tab and reporting. I think the colors used are very easy to read. A great Tiller addition.
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I have utilizing the new spending trends sheet. I think it has a lot more utility than the previous Insights sheet - great job!
I would like to recommend a feature for the portion of the sheet dealing with insights on income and expense categories: reformat the bars. From using the sheet the size/length of each bar seems to be showing the proportion each individual category is of total spending for all categories. The distance between the start of each bar and the end of each bar doesn’t have a discernible pattern to me
Ideally, these bars would visually show progress towards the achievement of each category’s monthly budget. If it was an overage it would be red, close to fulfilled would be yellow, underage or surplus would be green.
If there isn’t a way to code this into the sheet IMHO it would be better just to match the format of the Monthly Budget sheet.
Hi @Nic.Bab - thanks for your feedback here.
Since this is strictly focused on actuals, the bars will not correspond to budget targets. The intent with this sheet is that you can use it without budgeting. Each bar is relative to the largest amount in the corresponding category type.
Example, if your largest amount in the Expense type categories is your mortgage then every other expense type category’s value in the spark line will be relative to that mortgage amount. Hopefully that helps.
@MizMarie thanks for letting us know. Can you please write in to our support team using the chat in the lower right corner of the Tiller Console at https://my.tillerhq.com and we’ll troubleshoot there. We may need more detailed screenshots and the community is not the best place to post those.
I love this sheet. I had created a crude version of it myself, but without many options. It just showed spending in the last two months. This is great to have.
The only thing is it’d be awesome to have a pie chart in addition to the bar chart. For budgeting I just find pie charts way more useful to show me where most of my spending is going. Because it’s broken into categories along with subcategories it isn’t a simple matter of just creating my own pie chart based on the data.
I like the pie chart idea too. Our team was pretty torn on the chart type when we were building it. Thanks for this feedback and we’re glad you like it!
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Or, if not a pie chart, and combining this request with what @Nic.Bab said, maybe just add the ability to sort the bar chart on the bar size. This would show the highest utilization in each category at top, instead of alphabetical sort.
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Thanks for the insight!
I’m curious - from your user research, what proportion of Tiller users emphasize monitoring expenditures vs. keeping a budget? My sense is that is a tension associated with an insights sheet. Some folks want a bit more granular info on their spending habits, while others want to emphasize spending in the context of their budgetary goals.
Great question @Nic.Bab, while I can’t share specific stats I can say that that when we ask users what their goal for using Tiller is budgeting and tracking are in the top 2 
The Monthly and Yearly Budget sheets, which are still available and supported in the Foundation Template out of the box, are the resources for tracking progress against budget targets.
We’ve hidden them by default to reduce cognitive load for those just getting started with Tiller but they present nearly an identical view, except with the budget data available. The only potentially missing piece is a spark line that visually indicates how much of your actual represents what you’ve spent of your budget cap.
Spending Trends is the new solution for tracking spending when you’re not so interested in budgeting or just want a quick and streamlined view of where your spending is at in a certain time period without all the mental load of comparing against budgets.
I don’t closely follow budget but I do closely track my spending. I think it is common for people like me who “pre-budget” by automating their savings and required payments (mortgage, credit cards, some utilities). I know I have a certain amount I can safely spend each month.
However, even though I don’t closely follow a budget, I do make one a couple times a year as a form of financial review.
The Monthly Budget Calendar has been quite useful for me.
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I tried importing the spending trends dashboard into my existing Tiller sheet. It worked at first, but then when I selected a different time frame, all the data disappeared, and then it wouldn’t come back no matter which timeframe I selected from the dropdown. I’m getting a #REF error in cells AC2 and AQ2 (error message: “Array result was not expanded because it would overwrite data in AC101/AQ101”.
I contacted support via the chat button. Haven’t gotten to a resolution yet. Just posting here in case others run into similar issues.
So that just means that somehow something has gotten typed into those cells that are referenced. Go to those locations and delete the contents and it should fix your issue. That is for both cells AC101 and AQ101.
This is because those formulas will auto fill the cells below where they are located.
I didn’t type anything. But the spreadsheet itself is auto-populating empty check-boxes and getting in the way of itself somehow. I suspect there’s a “100” hard-coded somewhere in the backend, and that’s why the error is shows up in row 101.
For now, I seem to have gotten around the error by simply deleting some of the empty checkboxes that were present after row 100.
Continuing the discussion from New Spending Trends Dashboard for Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel:
I’m getting the same #REF! errors in AC2 and AQ2. When I reinstall Spending Trends, it shows “Hidden” in these cells along with the default populated data, but it errors when I change the date ranges - Same as you. I noticed that all cells (with checkboxes) from AC101 and AQ101 and later have “FALSE” in the formula bar. Very odd.
Hmm those accidentally auto populating like that sounds like a @randy question.
@stephenr I’d recommend reaching out to our support team via the chat window in the lower right corner of the Console at https://my.tillerhq.com/ - please just let the team know to pass to me per my note here in the Community.
FYI, that did not feel particularly intuitive, mainly because when you go to the ‘master’ spreadsheet you are greeted with the Instructions tab with lots of big, bold steps. One’s natural instinct is to begin doing those steps, when in fact you need to completely skip those steps if you already have a Foundation Template up and running.
Step 3 says “don’t request access” but I saw no option to do that.
Step 4 gives the correct instructions for copying the sheet over
However - in-between those steps there really needs to be a step that simply states "If you already have the Foundation Template installed, competely ignore the tab with all the instructions!
I mean, in the end, I figured it out and I guess most people probably will as well, but a bit of clarification here might prevent some extra support requests…
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Thanks for your feedback here @dixonge
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I’m noticing that at a certain point (Row 100 to be precise), the spark line scales are considerably off. They seem perfect from Row 100 up, but at Row 100 and down it really falls apart and does so until the last Category (Row 138 for me). The amount values are accurate, the corresponding spark lines are not.
Update: It looks like this issue is happening in the Expenses section, and is starting specifically with the Category that has the highest amount of all the expense categories. It’s the Max value as defined in the spark lines column formula, but instead of filling the entire bar as the Income Max value category does, it’s only filling a fraction. Everything below it is then considerably off scale.
Update 2: The issue is that after Row 100, E through J are not merged horizontally as they are for the preceding rows. If you select all of the rows that are showing incorrect scale and choose “Merge Horizontally”, the problem is fixed.
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Thanks for these updates. It sounds like you were able to work out a fix.
If you do run into any more weirdness with that template I’d recommend reaching out to our support team via the chat window in the lower right corner of the Console at https://my.tillerhq.com/