Man I wish paycheck processing would get with the times and either:
because while this solution is great given the current state of things, I’m far too lazy to actually do this much work on an ongoing basis. This is what computers are supposed to be for.
Agreed, shouldn’t be this hard…
Hello Super Hero…I’m new to Tiller…was a Quicken user for over 25 years. I’d like to try your Paycheck Deduction Transaction Generator but am not sure how to “Copy the “Paychecks” sheet to your Tiller Foundation template.” Can you help me understand the steps to take to make this happen? Your insights would be greatly appreciated! Ray
Woops, I never updated the documentation once the sheet was added to the Tiller Community Solutions Add-on. You can now install it from there (much easier). I’ve updated the documentation. Hope it works well for you, I still use it every two weeks!
Hello Super Hero - At this time, I’m more familiar with Excel as opposed to Google Sheets. Am I understanding correctly that your solution is compatible with Google Sheets and not Microsoft Excel?
@jpfieber Thanks for putting this together. Downloaded this today and have built it out up to Section 4 where I’m seeing an issue.
In Section 4, my Gross Income and deduction amounts are populating in column AS which is the “Date” column, and then the Category and Amount columns are blank. I presume the Category column once filled then automatically updates the Group column.
And I’m assuming you are deleting one of your Net Income lines after you paste into Transactions?
You’ll need a net income line to offset the one for your paycheck deduction, both would be categorized as Transfer types so only the Gross income is seen in reports as an Income type.
Not sure why amounts would show up in AS. What’s the heading of column AS? It should be whatever is in A1 of your Transactions sheet. The column below that heading then is supposed to grab that heading, then use the list in CO:CP to determine which column to grab from CB:DF.
Deleted the sheet and started over and it’s working now. Not sure what was happening with my first attempt. Did find one odd occurrence and it may be because you haven’t seen it yet?
I don’t have State Income Tax so I enter that amount as 0 in your Paycheck module which seems to break the Group column for some weird reason. I get a REF error in the Group column heading in both Transactions (which then blanks out the entire column there) and get the same REF error in the Group column heading in Section 4 of your tool.
If I delete the State Tax line in Transactions, everything resolves and the Group column fills back in.
You can rename column L from “StateTax” to anything you’d like (presumably one of your deductions, or you could just call it ‘D00’). You should then put the same thing in AH9.
Yeah, I tried that as the obvious answer and it jacks up the spreadsheet still. Odd. Not a big deal. I just deleted the State Tax transaction after I paste in the rows. Works well!
All my amounts under column AX are goofy dates like 2/9/1895. I see =IFERROR( on every column in row 4. The only amount that is correct is column AX, row 4, which is the gross paycheck.
The Configure Individual Transactions section is beautiful. 
Maybe delete and start over?
Generally you don’t need to worry about the formatting in section 4, everything you copy from there will take on the formatting in your transactions sheet. That’s not to say you can’t go in and add formatting to make it look nice (I can’t do that ahead of time because I don’t know what order your columns are in), but the formatting you add there won’t affect the transactions in the Transactions sheet since you’ll be pasting them in “as values only”, which means without formatting, so they match everything else there. Have you tried copying any transactions yet to see if they paste OK?
Holy cow. It worked! Fantastic!
Thank you
@jpfieber After using for the month of March, I’ve suddenly realized that this breaks the Account Reconciliation module (I think). Not sure how you are supposed to balance your checking account when using this? Gross Pay obviously doesn’t show up as a deposit on your bank statements and now Net Pay is categorized as a negative number and a Transfer so basically, I have no deposits listed in the Account Reconciliation tool now.
Am I missing something here?
Account Reconciliation does look at Transfer transactions since they affect the balance of the account, so it will see the Net Pay deposit which will correspond to a change in balance of the same amount. The negative Net Pay transaction is from a different ‘made up’ account that you wouldn’t be using Account Reconciliation for. I use both of these templates, so I know they work together. If yours isn’t working right, It’s likely something to do with the configuration of Paycheck Deduction Transaction Generator. If I had to guess, I’d say that you might have set the “Account” value in AO6 to the actual bank account where your check gets deposited. You don’t want to do that, instead, this should be a made up string like “ACME Paycheck” that does not match any of your existing accounts. It’s really only here to give you something to sort/filter your Transactions sheet by should you want to see only paycheck transactions. If you left that field blank, things would still work.
I never actually filled in AO6-AO8 on the Paycheck module. Left them blank. So that’s one problem so Account Reconciliation is looking for all transactions for that Account and isn’t seeing them to pull them in.
However, once I fix that how are you getting around the Net Pay now being a negative number and not showing as a Deposit in Account Reconciliation? Confused by that.
So in Paycheck module in AV and AW I have the following where these line items are positive or negative numbers. Net Wages is then coming over as a negative number in Account Reconcilation…
Gross Wages +
Net Wages -
Social Security -
Medicare -
Federal Tax - Withholding -
AO6 - AO8 are optional, you can continue to leave them blank and they won’t affect how things are working. The negative net pay that is generated by Paycheck Deduction Transaction Generator won’t affect Account Reconciliation because the negative net pay transaction is not a transaction from the account being reconciled (the Account column of the Transactions sheet doesn’t show your bank account). There should be a net pay transaction in your bank account that is positive of the same amount as the negative net pay transaction. That’s the transaction that affects your account balance and is seen by Account Reconciliation. The main reason we generate a negative net pay transaction is because if we didn’t, your budget would see the Gross Pay transaction we generate, and it would see the net pay transaction in your bank account, so it would show you has having over twice as much income as you really do. We need to ‘counteract’ the net pay transaction, but we don’t want to delete it since it’s necessary to keep your bank account accurate. Having a negative transaction of the same amount takes care of this so your budget sheets all balance properly.
Doh! I deleted that positive Net Pay deposit.
Life is hard when you are dumb!
LOL, none of us our dumb. We are just at different learning stages on any given topic!