What is the goal of your workflow? What problem does it solve, or how does it help you?
This spreadsheet is meant to enable someone to see at a glance, what their budget and, more importantly, what the rollover balances are, so individuals can make better decisions with their money. This spreadsheet allows someone to change the period and see how they did in any given month, as well as revert back to the starting point of an individuals budget and assess how they are looking throughout a period.
For me, this spreadsheet solved a few issues. (1) although i do work on a salary, i have significantly varying expenses month over month based on my job, where when i am working long and late, we are provided food, for example. This means that my expenses for that period may be significantly lower. With this spreadsheet, I am able to move my budgeted expenses around each month. In the Categories tab, you are able to set up a budget month by month, and therefore, using my example, i can move money in the month where i am not spending as much on food, to another category, such as savings. (2) the second issue is providing me an overall snapshot in a clear and concise way of where I stand on my budget. It allows the flexibility of looking at how i did month by month and how i am doing period to date.
How did you come up with the idea for your workflow?
I have been building this template for several years. Before i learned about Tiller, i was manually importing all credit card and bank transactions, but with Tiller, I can leave the manual labor of that to the automation and focus on looking at and adjusting my spending habits and my budget.
Please describe your workflow. What are the sheets? Does it use any custom scripts or formulas?
Budget Dashboard - This is the overview sheet. There is a space to put in the date for the beginning of the period and end of period that you want to look at the budget for (use the first day of the month for BOTH beginning and ending, as the formulas automatically pull the end of the month). The formulas within here pull from a specific column in the Categories tab, which sums up the relevant monthly budgets based on the From and Thru fields at the top.
Acct Reconciliation - This tab is meant to ensure that all transactions have appropriately made their way into the transactions tab by comparing the sum of those to the ending balances per the Balance History tab. Depending on how often the balances are pulled, there is some manual intervention required here to update the “+X” which is listed twice in the formulas under “Yodlee Pull” column to get to the correct date. This tab does require a “starting balance” entry in the transactions page to work correctly.
Categories - This is where you input your monthly budget and can change the allocation of expenses. The top row has a formula which will indicate if your income doesn’t match the allocated expenses. The Group/Category columns match the dashboard boxes, but the dashboard does have to be manually updated (with formulas copied) for any changes in the Categories tab. Savings are listed as an expense here so I can properly allocate income into savings on a monthly basis.
Notes - This tab has some notes on how on how to properly record certain types of transactions. I used it to help remind me about how to manually update all sheets for interest received on my checking and savings accounts, for example to ensure everything flowed through the sheets properly and reconciled. This also has instructions for how to record unexpected cash receipts and transfers from Savings to Checking. The basic flow of this spreadsheet requires all expenses and income to come from the main checking account, and be moved from there to the proper place (i.e. pay off CC or transfer for savings)
All other tabs are the standard tabs from Tiller
Anything else you’d like people to know?
Although there is some manual intervention required in here, the main reason is that i dont know all of the formulas that would be required to update. I think each of the manual tasks here could be automated somehow.
Is it ok for others to copy, use, and modify your workflow?
Yes
If you said yes above, please make a copy of your workflow and share the copy’s URL:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DQEAAC8hDBaK9NCKPenvpLrsJXFG0eKydxiiVKHbRqE/template/preview