I’m new to Google Sheets and relatively new to Tiller, so this question may not even make sense, but I’m just trying to set up a recurring Monthly Budget.
I’ve been using Tiller for a couple of months to track expenses, and its going beautifully. I’ve set up my custom categories and all transactions are categorized and accounted for. Great!
In the bottom menu bar, I see an option for “Monthly Budget.” I clicked there, assuming I can start setting up my budget by putting in my budgeted amounts for each category in the “Budget” column. When I override the “you shouldn’t edit this category” pop-up and enter in those values, my Income lines show #REF! My “Spending Budget” number is still set to 0, and doesn’t reflect all the numbers I’ve entered in as my budgeted amounts for each category. I can’t seem to find a video or a discussion of how to use this particular function.
It looks like maybe I need to set up a separate sheet for an Envelope Budget? But when I go into Categories there, none of my custom categories are set up. Will I be starting fresh with this sheet, and start tracking my expenses from today’s date rather than from March, when I set up my basic Tiller spreadsheet? Will I need to reenter all my categories? That would be a bummer!
Why is there a monthly budget in the bottom menu bar if it’s not usable? What am I missing?
I’m just a user, not an expert but I think I can help a little. The Monthly Budget sheets shows how you are doing against your budget. You put your budget numbers into your Categories sheet (starting at Column E). Once you get the budget set, the Month Budget shows how you are doing in each category (over/under, etc).
@farris_katie, I wanted to chime in about the Envelope budget question. You would need to start a separate sheet if you’d like to use that feature. You can migrate the data you’ve already spent customizing from the Foundation template. It won’t bring over any budget data, but it will bring over the rest.
If you see those REF errors you can correct them easily by removing the amounts you manually entered into budgets on the Monthly Budget sheet or you can restore the Monthly Budget sheet using the Labs add-on.
