I’ve been using Tiller since about October and loving it. I’m really just using it for basic expense/category tracking at the moment, but plant to start using the budgeting features in the future.
I recently purchased a car, and created a category “Car purchase” to track all of the expenses related to it. Everything was fine until just a few days ago, when I attempt to use that category, I get the attached error message (“The data you entered in cell D24 violates the data validation rules set on this cell”). I’ve previously used this category with no issue.
I also noticed that another category is causing the same error: “Auto maintenance”. It seems that all of my other categories are still working correctly (although I’ll admit I didn’t take the time to test every category). I’ve also previously used this category with no issue.
To my knowledge, I’ve made no changes to my sheet, just importing transactions and categorizing them appropriately.
Does anyone know what might be causing this error? I tried searching the community but couldn’t find any threads with the same problem.
You can correct this by fixing the data validation rule on the Category column in the Transactions sheet using these steps as a guide:
Usually this happens because of the way rows are sorted or rearranged on the Categories sheet. Inserting or moving rows above or just below row 2 will break the validation.
I followed the guide (see screenshot), but unfortunately I’m still encountering the error.
I made sure to select all the cells starting from D2 all the way to the end of my data. I also confirmed the column D is correct on the transactions sheet, and column A is correct on the categories sheet.
Yes, they are on the categories sheet, and spelled correctly. I haven’t modified these categories since I originally set them up (auto maint. i setup months ago, car purchase just a couple weeks ago).
I found another one that also doesn’t work: “Charity deductible”. This was also setup a couple months ago.
Anything else I can check that might help you troubleshoot?
What was the solution to this issue? I’m having the exact same problem. We haven’t touched any cells in our Categories tab in months, and we used the now problematic category 2 months ago on 8/12/2020.
NOTE: This is only occurring for 1 of the 3 google accounts with access to this sheet. I’m using Firefox.
We concluded that it was specific to Firefox - likely due to some update - and messing around with settings could help or using a different browser. Essentially, we never figured out a fix for Firefox and is likely a Google/Firebox bug, not on our end.
I have the same problem after changing my file from excel to Google sheet. The problem still occurred, although I removed the validation and recreated it for the cell.
Finally, I did a trick that I though you may try: Change all items on my data list to TEXT format by adding the Apostrophe to the beginning of them (ex: A → 'A, B->'B).
Hope this helps.
Hi Heather
Im having this same issue except none of my transactions are being auto categorized because of this issue. Im not the most tech savvy but I have made no changes to my sheet and auto cat was working fine a couple days ago. In layman’s terms, could you explain how I can fix this?
My guess is you changed a Category name. Look at Cell D3 on your AutoCat sheet and your Transactions sheet to see if you see a cell with a little red triangle at the top right. If you change a category name, you have to get rid of all the old version names of that category before AutoCat will run happily.
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