Not seeing the value?

Google Sheets
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1

Maybe I’m doing something wrong or maybe my sheet template is messed up? But for me, it seems like all Tiller does well is auto categorize transactions… Which is awesome! But I need a bit more than that, especially for a product I would pay for.

I’ve tried a lot of different financial and budget solutions and Tillers AutoCat feature is the best I’ve ever seen. But I wish so badly that it could do more because Tiller feels like a really great product.

Here’s how I have mine setup:

All of my accounts are plugged-in and my Transactions tab is filled with transactions, most of which are categorized with rules that I’ve added. From here, everything looks great.

But here’s what I want: a bird-eye view of how much I spend on a category and or group for the month.

The Categories tab looks like it does that. When I first used Tiller, I thought the columns in the category tab would auto-populate with sums of how much I spent on a given category. But instead, they appear to be budget buckets which… don’t seem to do anything for me?

When I add values to the category buckets, they show up on the Yearly Budget, but that is not the format I am looking for. And the Yearly Budget tab is dreadfully busy.

The Monthly Budget tab does not seem to work for me at all. It appears to calculate my “Paychecks” but nothing else. For example, I put say $1000 into the business budget, and even though my business expenses are categorized and grouped, nothing shows up on the tab and the values are all 0.

And the last tab I want to mention is the Insight tab which is not useful at all because it includes transactions and amounts for everything, including transfers and credit card payments, so the reports/insights are not useful at all.

As I said, Tiller seems like a great product and I love the direction it is going but it is simply not functional for me.

2

Take a look at the Categoy Tracker Sheet. This shoudl provide you some insight on your spending.

Here is a screenshot of mine . It is a bit customized for my needs, but the basics are from the category tracker sheet.

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3

This sounds like exactly what I am looking for. One problem - where do I find it?

I found a Category Report in Tiller Money Labs which sounds useful for drilling into categories but what show in your screenshot is, like, exactly what I am looking for.

For me, let’s less about budgeting and more about keeping track of spending and overruns (which is similar but the context is different).

4

When I get home I can send you my version and you can just copy it over to your sheet

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5

I would check out -

comparisons
business dashboard
spending trends
monthly analysis
weekly analysis
weekly trends
yearly insights

These and much more are found in Tiller Labs.

I think you might only be seeing the templates that loaded by default.

If so, then you are only seeing a small part of what Tiller offers.

Let us know.

6

Just to clarify a bit: Tiller Money Labs isn’t a “product offering” really, it’s an experiment with all the quality and security implications that come with that. I won’t install it anywhere near my personal data.

-Brasten

7

I know that. It is your call which you have made very clear. Maybe the Tiller folks can address your concerns. Thanks, Blake

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8

I am Tiller-folk. :smile:

9

Here its teh article from Tiller about the sheet.

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10

@brian2 it sounds to me like your Monthly Budget sheet is a bit broken, especially if you have transactions for the selected period (top right drop downs for year/month of monthly budget) categorized, but you’re seeing $0 for actuals.

I’d recommend reviewing this FAQ on some common issues folks run into where edits break the dashboard, especially, if restoring the Monthly Budget sheet using Tiller Money Labs doesn’t help.

Also, wanted to share that the Insights sheet has some hidden/grouped rows that will show you an analysis for spending/earnings based on categorizations, vs everything once you’ve categorized some transactions, but if something is broken with the data feeding into this sheet (because of a missing header - see FAQ I mentioned above) then it also will be “broken”

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11

This is the ticket! I believe this resolves the issue concerning features/value I was having.

Thank you!

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12

I did not see this listed as an option, what I have done is to create a PIVOT sheet of transactions by Month at Top and Categories on the left, I can then see this month to last month , granted until a month finished, current month is not complete, so it is not intended for where am I on the 11th of this month compared to the 11th of last month sort of thing.

Using filters, I limit what is shown to the last 13 months.

To Pivots and some other enhancements I have done easier, I added 2 additional columns to my Transactions sheet (all the way to the right):
Year and Quarter

YEAR formula: =ARRAYFORMULA(IF(ROW(B:B) = 1, “Year”, if(B:B<>"",year(B:B),"")))
Quarter formula = ARRAYFORMULA(if(row(B1:B) = 1,“Quarter”,if(B1:B="","",“Q”&TO_TEXT(ROUNDUP(MONTH(B1:B)/3,0)))))

With those, i then created pivots that allow me to show categories by Year & Quarter on the same sheet, just click + or - to show/hide the detail, that could be extended to month as well.

Hope that helps

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