Procedure for New Year - 2020

Google Sheets
1

What are people planning on doing to start tracking in a new year?

My plan was to:

1 - Make a copy of my current Excel tracker spreadsheet to save all the 2019 transaction and year-end balances.
2 - Update my budget amounts for 2020
3 - Delete all 2019 tranactions
4 - Keep balances as of 12/31/19
5 - General housekeeping to reflect the new year

That are others doing?

1 Like
2

This sounds like a good idea. I normally wait until mid-January to delete all old transactions.
How are you finding a way to start the 2020 budgeting? I’m not able to create new 2020 transactions/budgets in the Categories sheet.

3

I do all my budgeting in a separate Excel spreadsheet. Once I am done I copy the values into the tiller spreadsheet. By the first week of January I will have all the 2020 stuff loaded.

4

Same here! I considered leaving the 2019 transactions in there, but concluded that I don’t really need them, and I presume the more data, the longer it will take to open and to save.

5

That sounds like a good plan. I haven’t looked over the Webinar yet (search webinar on this site if this link doesn’t work) but I guess I’ll do that and see, but this seems like a nice simple way to about it!

6

Even with a very fast computer my spreadsheet takes 10 seconds to recalc. Removing the 2019 transactions will definitely be a help.

It got so slow that I turned off automatic recalc so I could import transactions and balances much more quickly.

7

I’ve recently started addressing this issue. Until now, I had all of my data since inception (March 2018) in one workbook which made everything incredibly slow. With the new year I wanted to revamp everything and only have the current year’s data in the Tiller-linked sheet. Initially I tried to export a copy of the workbook to excel but ran into problems with formatting and custom functions. So, I’ve come up with a different plan that seems to be working pretty well, is straight forward, and is pretty similar to your plan @dminches.

  1. Create a copy of the linked google workbook (File > Make a copy)
  2. In the copied workbook:
    a. remove all data from the current year (e.g., transactions, balance history, statements, etc.) if any exist.
    b. set all periods to “Custom” with range from 1/1/20XX to 12/31/20XX.
  3. In the original workbook:
    a. remove all data from previous year(s)
    b. update budget amounts to reflect new targets/goals, if necessary.

To address @john.warren3’s question above, I’ve set cell E1 on the categories sheet to the following formula:

=DATE(year(today()),1,1)

This will automatically change the column headings to the months for the current year. To have the months accurately reflected on the copied sheet, this value will need to be changed to 1/1/20XX.

The obvious drawback to this approach is that you lose access to historical data within the current year’s workbook so periods such as “last year/quarter/month” don’t work as intended. But, by setting the copied workbook periods to reflect the appropriate year, I’m able to quickly view an end of the year snapshot for all of my historical data. Moreover, I can still quickly access specific data within that year should I need it.

I should note that I’ve only recently made these changes so I can’t say with absolute certainty that there are no adverse events as a result. But, since you’re only manipulating old data that isn’t changed after it’s fed into the workbook by Tiller, there shouldn’t be any problems that I can think of. But, only time will tell.

8

Sounds like you all have some great ideas, very similar to the guidance in the help article here:

9

Thanks.

I executed what I had written and it worked great.

Happy new year!