This question is primarily directed at former Quicken users, which I’ve used for the past 15 years and decades of Microsoft Money before that.
I signed up for Tiller yesterday to try it out, and I noticed the subscription price of both services is nearly the same. While I am a fairly proficient spreadsheet user (and do enjoy working with spreadsheets), my first impression is that it is harder to get Tiller to “just work.”
I didn’t like the account names that my institutions imported so I searched how to change them and found the process to be cumbersome compared to editing just one field in Quicken. Is this the case for most editing inside of Tiller?
I am retired and no longer need budgeting to keep myself on track. My needs are to keep track of my bank account transactions, my credit cards and my investments in a fair amount of detail.
I don’t mind paying for Tiller the first year so I can run both Quicken and Tiller in parallel, but I’m wondering if I should make the effort to convert?
For those of you who have switched from Quicken, how are you benefiting given that the pricing for both services is nearly the same?
Welcome @sblagoue, I personally think it’s well worth the effort. I used Quicken for many years before it was sold by Intuit (and I think it’s been sold another time since). I switched to Tiller about 5 years ago and use it with Google Sheets. At this time I wouldn’t foresee myself switching again - the major benefit with this product is that you have complete and total control and flexibility. The only limitation is your imagination. That may not be for everyone, but if you do enjoy working with spreadsheets it is a no brainer in my opinion. For me it’s kind of like choosing whether to rent a solution and have “mostly” everything handled by others or own the solution and be able to customize whatever you want. Sure there are pros and cons to both, but for me it’s been a great experience. Yes it takes a little time to set-up but once you have it running it is usually a well oiled machine with plenty of room for upgrades. You also have a great community of people here willing to help with any questions that you may have.
As far as editing the account names, I believe that it’s also a one field edit in the Tiller console by clicking the Edit button beside the account that you wish to change - see the screenshot below.
Hey Kyle, thanks so much for your input. I was beginning to wonder just how interactive the Tiller community actually is, and I appreciate that you took some time from your day to give me your opinion.
Everyone else, I’d be appreciate if you have anything to add.
Long time MS Money and Quicken user. For me, Quicken got extremely bogged down, buggy, and extraordinarily slow. I also did not like their budgeting feature. It took absolutely forever to update.
And while their Investment tracking was beyond granular it was so engineered that it would constantly break and require a CFP to try and figure it all out if you really wanted to use it to its fullest. It was overwhelming and I completely understand why the Tiller folks have continually punted on adding this.
I think Quicken ultimately suffered from being too feature rich without a way to dial it back. With Tiller, I can make it as feature rich as I want by simply just using the modules I want.
Having said all that and to be somewhat objective, I have found the longer I go in Tiller the slower it does get. But I think that is a function of Google Sheets more than anything. I ultimately plan to switch into Excel at some point soon. I’ve already test driven it and it’s pretty much instantaneous and that’s probably because you can run it locally on your own machine whereas you can’t do that with Google Sheets (unless I’m missing something).
Former Microsoft Money and Quicken user here too. I started using Tiller in late 2019.
One big reason at the time was I that I did not want to move to their annual subscription plan - I would use the “old” software until the download activity ended and then I would update to the current version. When the annual subscription plan started it nudged me into looking at what other alternatives might be out there.
I found Tiller and have never looked back. The ease of customizing everything for the way I want it to be, sharing it easily with my husband, and the community of people here are the reasons we pay Tiller annually. And at least right now, they have grandfathered pricing at the price you paid when you joined.
My experience is similar to others. Longtime Quicken user who found Quicken to be very buggy. Only one way to do budgeting and it wasn’t suitable for my needs. When I wanted to change my category structure, it disrupted all my past data in Quicken and the manual effort to fix was too great so I switched to Tiller. And never looked back. Tiller is much more flexible. And if it doesn’t do something I want to do “out of the box”, chances are there is already a community solution for it. I’m comfortable using spreadsheets (but no pro), and I like that I can whip up a pivot table easily to answer a question or get a certain view of my transaction data if needed. If you only want to monitor your transactions and spending, then Tiller is very easy to use and reliable; and very accommodating of different ways to do budgeting. Also nowhere near the bank feed issues I had with Quicken.
sblagoue: I don’t enter future transactions in Tiller, and I didn’t use Quicken investment features. I’m also not linking investment accounts to Tiller, preferring to use other tools for tracking investments.
I enter future transactions into Tiller. You can use the Tiller Money Feeds extension “Tools/Add Manual Transaction”. To reconcile them later you can use the Tiller Community Solutions extension “Transaction/Reconcile Transactions”.
I also have a sheet called Recurring Transactions that holds items like monthly deposits, bills, credit card payments, etc. I can copy/paste those transactions into the Transactions sheet which I find to be faster than entering the data into Add Manual Transaction. As long as you keep the Metadata field (in the Transactions Sheet) populated with the same format of {“manualTransaction”:{“reconcile”:true,“ignoredIds”:}}, the Reconcile feature still works like a charm.
I did track investments in Quicken, but decided that the information available at Fidelity provided me with more than enough investment details and reports. I am letting the various buy/sells load into my Transactions sheet but I use the category Investment Transactions for them and then hide that category from reports.
Thanks for your insight. I’ve also set up my own recurring transactions sheet which I “copy>paste values” into the Transactions sheet. I’ll try your trick of including the metadata!
Hi Steve - I am in the same boat. I have been a Quicken user since 1993, and really have no problems with it. I even like the way budgeting works there, and the ability to have monthly allocations rollover to the next time period is extremely valuable in my eyes. that said, I like the idea of an Excel-based solution so I am kicking the tires on Tiller. I have set up my accounts and successfully pull data, etc. I have watched the Webinar on getting started. Everything on the Foundations sheet seems very, very basic to me. I know that I am probably missing a lot with other add-ins, etc., that will greatly enhance the Tiller experience, but I am having a hard time figuring out how to get started getting deeper into it. If anyone can point me to any resources I can use to start seeing the ‘bigger picture’ available with this product I would greatly appreciate it. I don’t want to dismiss it without giving it a fair shake. Thank you very much!
Oh, and seeing more regarding handling investment handling, tracking, etc., is of particular interest. I am really unsure how to deal with those transactions, etc., in this context.
and the ability to have monthly allocations rollover to the next time period is extremely valuable in my eyes.
Check out the Savings Budget sheet for adding this functionality to Tiller. I use this sheet, and it’s great for tracking allocation amounts outside of monthly bounds.
@raharris thanks for your reply. If you stick with Tiller, how will you monitor your investments?
Like you, I’ve used Quicken for a very long time, since 2009, and before that, Microsoft Money since about 1990. I’m retired now and investment tracking is more critical to me than budgeting.
That is a very good question. I am recently retired, as well. I find the budgeting to be important to me as I never really had a budget prior to being retired. Getting a clear view of where my money goes is very helpful in planning/modeling. I use Empower.com some for investment and balance tracking. I am a customer there, but I understand that you can use their online tools for free, regardless. They are able to hook up to all of my accounts and pull the data in. You can see how your investments are performing relative to relevant indexes, etc. They also have some good tools for modeling retirement spending/withdrawals. I also use NewRetirement.com for retirement modeling, etc. It has a free version, but to get the most out of it you are best off spending the $120/year to unlock the full functionality. It can get pretty advanced, really.
I am not sure I gave you a great answer to your question. At this point I still really like Quicken for daily (and intra-day) investment tracking and am not sure I would abandon it, even with the tools mentioned above.
