Question for Experienced Users: Why Tiller vs Quicken for same price?

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I was a long time Microsoft Money user before going to Quicken, and I never really did like the experience of Quicken after Money shut down. I had numerous issues with Quicken losing transactions, duplicating transactions, not supporting certain account types quite right (like spending from FSAs). So much of what I wanted to do felt like it was not supported or “hackey”. The final straw for me was an issue that cropped up last year in August when they changed the sync with Chase bank. Something they did caused a number of problems with duplicate and lost transactions, and the thread that was running on the support site kept getting updated once a week with “We’re still investigating…” for probably 6 months, to the point where the updates started to feel like an insult.

Going from Quicken, with effectively no customer support (every issue was basically “try starting a new file”) to TIller with its very customer-focused support team, was ultimately what got me to move. It’s a decision I do not regret.

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Hi Steve,

Can I ask if you used the investment tracking functionality of Quicken or relied on it for investment tracking?

Thanks!

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I happily left Quicken a long time ago. Their Mac product was not on par with the Windows version.

But more importantly, I was limited to the reports Quicken provided. With spreadsheets, you can create reports customized the way you want OR use Tiller’s sheets OR find sheet templates in the community here that might meet your needs. With some spreadsheet knowledge, you can extend Tiller or community sheets for your own situation.

I’ve recently had to use Quicken to help a family member. And I’ve rediscovered why I hated Quicken. It doesn’t let me customize my reports like Tiller can. On some investment accounts, it forces a categorization that I can’t adjust and makes it harder to separate non-retirement from retirement dividend income. Quicken doesn’t always match both sides of a transaction correctly. I could go on and on with its shortcomings.

It is true that Tiller doesn’t provide the same Investment reporting as Quicken. But since Tiller uses Google Sheets (and Excel), you can combine Tiller with Google Sheets functions to manage your investment tracking.

Using the GOOGLEFINANCE() function, you can get current stock and 1 day-delayed mutual fund prices.

See here:

I believe Excel can also fetch stock market data.

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Jono, thanks very much for your insight.

Even with the finance functions, what is truly needed is to be able to track holdings/shares of individual securities, lots purchased and sold to keep track of share balance, and to track the portfolio return. I’m looking into alternatives for that and into building my own spreadsheet, but unless Tiller pulls the number of shares with each transaction, I’m not sure that would be very helpful.

Best,

Steve

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As of now, Tiller doesn’t track the number of shares. I think there was an attempt at this a few years ago. This current limitation might be due to the 3rd party aggregator that Tiller uses.

Here’s a long community thread that discusses this further:

https://community.tillerhq.com/t/position-history/573/24

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I just found this product, forum, and thread… primarily because I’m both a Quicken user and a Mint user. I also just learned that Mint is shutting down, so I’m looking for my next solution to financial tracking.

My primary issue with Quicken is that, because it duplicates and misses transactions, I don’t trust ANY of the account totals in Quicken. I have not been able to reconcile a statement in years.

Does Tiller suffer from either of these issues and, if not, how does Tiller avoid the issues? Do you have to monitor the incoming transactions and approve them before they are accepted?

Thanks!!

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It’s a bit hard to answer this question without knowing what was causing the duplicate and missed transactions with Quicken. All of these services (Mint, Quicken, Tiller, Empower, Monarch, Copilot) rely on an aggregator to gather account information and supply it to your data (whether it be an app or a spreadsheet). There are different aggregators–Yodlee, Plaid, MX, probably others–and some of these aggregators work better with certain accounts than others. In my own case (and as I’ve now written a few times here), I’ve tried all of the above, and Tiller via Yodlee is the first one that has been able to successfully and consistently provide data on all of my accounts. It makes me irrationally happy. :slight_smile:

Even there, it’s not perfect–there was a Chase outage last week that took almost a week to resolve itself, some of my loan information doesn’t update perfectly, etc. But it’s the best I’ve found for me. The for me part is critical. Different people have different accounts and, therefore, have different experiences. I’d recommend trying the free Tiller trial with your accounts to see how well they work, and if you encounter any problems, give the Tiller team a chance to try and fix them. In my experience, most connection issues seem magically to resolve themselves after a few days. Other issues may require the Tiller folks pinging Yodlee to figure out what’s going on.

Finally, fwiw, I think the hope is that the move to open banking is going to help address these issues. We ought to be able to access our financial information securely without jumping through lots of hoops, and open banking is about making that happen. All of the banks on Tiller that I use that have adopted open banking seem to update quickly and smoothly, so I think there’s reason for optimism there but it’s going to take a while for everybody to implement open banking.

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You do have to manually initiate the process of filling your spreadsheet with new transactions, so you have an opportunity to review them all immediately. Because new transactions come in uncategorized, if you are diligent about applying categories, it becomes easy to separate out the ones you’ve seen from the ones you haven’t seen yet. I even added a conditional formatting rule to highlight uncategorized transactions.

And that really brings us to the other point: It’s a spreadsheet. There are really no constraints as to what you do with the data once it’s filled in. My experience has been that duplicate/missing transactions are virtually never a thing, and in the exceedingly rare case that you see something that isn’t right, you can simply delete/update/manually correct whatever’s wrong. Since it’s just basic spreadsheet math, there’s nothing “under the hood” going on that you can’t correct, contrary to Quicken. The balances are managed from what’s downloaded from the financial institutions, not a summed up ledger from the transactions themselves. The transactions are just “data”. The balances are independent of the rows in the Transaction ledger. (There are ways to manually manage transactions and have those update the balances, but that’s really not needed if you have everything automated.)

I would recommend using the trial period to set up a few accounts and get familiar with how Tiller works. If you have questions, there’s an active community and helpful support staff to assist you in getting comfortable.

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I haven’t used Quicken officially but understand the gist of it fairly well. For me Tiller and its “sandbox” philosophy has been a game-changer. I have used it in a number of ways. During the very handy 30-day trial period, I started with some of the canned templates but quickly started customizing them in myriad of ways and then also using the account IDs, balance history, and transactions data to hook into my own budgeting, investment tracking, and retirement calculator spreadsheets that I’ve used for years but have always been annoyed at the need to go track down transactions and balances in varied ways depending on the institution.

So I now have a number of really cool views that Tiller and its users provide and also fully automated “legacy” spreadsheets that I’ve grown to love over the years. The point is for me, being a fairly regular spreadsheet user, that Tiller enables seemingly infinite possibilities, which is unmatched in any way when considering any other product I have seen - including Quicken. What they have done is what I have been looking for since I started budgeting, but it also has so many use cases that I haven’t thought of yet. And for categorization, admittedly I was very confused by AutoCat at first because I wanted it to just do the work for me. But it encourages you to think thoughtfully about how you want the finance world to look and once set, it works beautifully. I know Quicken has categorization and account balance quirks that to me are just far more easily handled when you have complete control.

The other thing that is neat to me about Tiller is that you own the data - once downloaded, there’s no “what-if Tiller goes away, what happens to my stuff and my views” - it’s yours. Which is incredibly powerful and comforting when dealing with sensitive data and views that we grow to depend on regularly. Also, the support team is very responsive and knowledgeable.

With respect to your needs to “keep track of my bank account transactions, my credit cards and my investments in a fair amount of detail” - my stuff is doing all of this because of Tiller very smoothly. I pull in all the transactions and graphically show where I’m spending over time, and I use the investment transaction detail and account balance information to calculate compounded returns and compare my investments automatically as soon as Tiller posts new data - sure it took a little VBA to make it all work the way I am doing it, but the data Tiller provides makes it such that I almost never need to log into my investment accounts anymore, which is huge for me.

Sorry for the rambling but wanted to chime in with my two cents given the discovery of Tiller has literally changed every way I handle my financial account oversight and eliminated so many annoying pain points. Hope that helps.

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Hi all, I started this thread and have been reading it and want to thank all of you for your insight.

As an update, my trial ended on December 6 and I am now a paid Tiller user, with some caveats and a couple of observations:

First, with regard to pending transactions, which seems to be a running point of concern (or a want) through many comments in the forum. I’m handling this manually without any problem. I’m running in Excel. I do enter future transactions into my Transactions sheet and manually shade those that have not yet cleared (not exactly conditional formatting because I am doing it myself). As transactions clear, I delete the formatting and delete the duplicate transaction. I’m doing this on my own quite efficiently and all my accounts are still in balance.

I came up with a check register sheet so I can track my account balance (including future transactions) just like I would in Quicken. I’m old school–my dad taught me how to use a paper check register decades ago and the habit has stuck. This is the way I like to view my finances. Quicken does this perfectly, but since Tiller transactions for all of your accounts come to one central sheet, I’ve found the process clearing future transactions to be quite simple.

I’ve also built my own rudimentary “transaction splitter.” My method is to keep the original transaction total intact but change the category to “Split,” which is a transfer catetory.

I then split the total transaction into its various categories, but for these transactions, I use an ACCOUNT named “Split.” This account exists only on my transaction sheet. I haven’t officially added it to Tiller and do not want to see this account on my Tiller balances sheet. I came up with this system after using the Sheets version of Tiller, which seemed to split the original transaction apart. Perhaps I’m mistaken about this but in my view that is the wrong way to do a split. Using my method, the original transaction continues to exist in my Transaction sheet, yet my categorization can be split as many times as necessary.

I agree that owning your data in a spreadsheet has some great advantages, but I disagree that you don’t “own” your data if you are using Quicken. When I started my trial, I found it very easy to copy and paste groups of transactions from Quicken into Tiller (with a template sheet set up to do just a bit of manipulation). I now have the entire year 2023 entered into Tiller and it was dead simple. Quicken users can easily do the same thing I did and their data is not stuck in Quicken. You own your data, same as Tiller.

That being said, one thing I’ve always found clumsy about Quicken is the Reports feature. It will do what you want but it takes some experience and nuance to get your reports exactly as you want them. You do have more flexibility with Tiller in this regard. There aren’t as many canned reports, virtually none, actually, but when tax time comes this year I will simply copy all of my transactions into a new sheet that is outside of my Tiller workbook. I’ll then use that sheet to create reports to my heart’s content, and in fact it was this realization that for me provided enough value to pay for a Tiller subscription.

With regard to Quicken being prone to “double transactions” or to download issues, I’m going to go against the grain and defend Quicken. As a user of Quicken since 2009 (and Microsoft Money for decades before that), I have had “almost” no issues with either problem. Frankly, I think Quicken works exceedingly well and that most problems in the area of double transactions are caused by user error. Sorry if I’ve stepped on any toes here.

Another area where Quicken excels is in investment tracking. That is keeping track of shares owned, share transaction, capital gains, etc. I will miss this if and when I leave Quicken for good, and for those of you who are anxious for Tiller to add these features, I suggest you just set up a free subscription to Empower or another portfolio tracker and keep your exact portfolio there.

At any rate, I am currently using both Quicken and Tiller. Still evaluating. But I did pay for a subscription and I will enjoy the ride this year, watching to see how Tiller develops over time. As many have commented, Quicken support is weak, and I very much enjoy this forum, which was yet another reason I paid up.

Best to everyone in the new year!

Steve

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Thanks for starting this thread. It was interesting to read all of the comments. I have been a Mint user for 20 years but had always exported my transactions in Excel. I’m still in my trial period but so far it does everything that I want/need. I’ve created one tab with a table to better visualize my monthly expense as they approach my budget limits. I really like it and plan on subscribing once my trial period is up. Mint hasn’t officially announced when it will shut down completely but I’m “shutting it down” on Dec. 31st.

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My first post here, which seems appropriate since I’m also a tourist coming from decades(!) of Quicken. I paid for Tiller and run it in parallel now, to see how it goes before deciding for 2024.

I know most folks here are long-time Tiller users, but as someone new to it, it feels very… slow. I’m using it in Google Sheets, and it’s more cumbersome than Quicken to start up and use. First you load the Sheet, then the start the extension, then wait for that to run, then sync accounts, then get to it. I don’t know if it’s something I’m doing wrong, but the load and sync take several minutes.

Further, it seems to constantly disconnect from both Morgan Stanley and E*Trade with no real hint that it’s missing the transaction download. I have to go reconnect the accounts.

Quicken had a blinding-fast “search” function that could find any field of any transaction in any account. I haven’t found the equivalent yet in Tiller/Sheets, but I suspect it’s more my clumsy way around Google Sheets than any fault.

I know Google Sheets also has a number-of-lines limit on each spreadsheet – how does Tiller handle that? I have far more transactions in Quicken than the sheet limit, and I worry that I will eventually hit it.

The all-accounts-combined-in-one-ledger part of Tiller must be something other people have sorted out. Right now, I have a Transaction tab that is ALL the transactions, and some accounts are very active with automatic reinvestments and trades… it’s a big cluttered mess in that tab. I’m tempted to split my sheet into one-sheet-per-account, but then I’m in for many times the startup delay and sync, I presume.

All in all, I feel like Quicken was many times faster to sync, and easier to see each account. But I’m new at Tiller, and have to assume others have figured this out or there wouldn’t be such a large community following. So far, I’m just using the “stock” Tiller configuration… maybe the answer is in plug-ins or extensions?

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I should mention that I tried Beancount and Hledger and GnuCash before Tiller. I got to really like the double-entry systems, but none of them have automatic data import that works. If I could have Tiller (or Quicken’s) account import into something like GnuCash, I’d be all set. Once you get the hang of double-entry, it rocks. Is there an extension that turns TillerHQ sheets into something like that?

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Hi, Max. I’m relatively new here myself, but so far, I’m very happy with Tiller. A few replies:

-On the slowness, the “refresh and fill” process is the one thing I don’t love about Tiller. I like to process this stuff first thing in the morning (which is very early for me), and Tiller usually hasn’t run its automated process yet. So far, I’m content to click the necessary buttons while I drink my first cup of coffee, but I do wish there was a more expedient solution for this.

-The slowness issue might also have to do with your number of transactions. Tiller seems generally to recommend no more than a few years of transactions in your spreadsheet before you archive it and start another. Lots of transactions and lots of complicated spreadsheets slow things down.

-Archiving and starting a new sheet is also, I suspect, how Tiller would recommend dealing with hitting the max number of rows allowed by Google Sheets. I’d prefer to keep everything in one sheet for the purposes of historical comparisons, so my plan is to do that until I just can’t anymore.

-For quickly searching transactions, you might try the Transaction Tracker sheet. Maybe not a lightning fast Google-like search experience, but it generally finds me what I’m looking for without too much trouble.

-On the issues with Morgan Stanley and E*Trade, I’d reach out to customer service. Specific bank connections are hard to diagnose on this forum. Fwiw, I’ve had a couple of connections go down, but the outages have never lasted very long and always resolved themselves.

-On the plus side, what I really do love about Tiller is the ability to fully customize just about everything. I’m a tinkerer. I love to play with different approaches to organizing things like finances. Tiller, through Google Sheets, allows me to tinker endlessly (and easily, using filters and the like). I finally feel like I’m close to having everything set up exactly as I want it, which is something I’ve never been able to do with other platforms.

Hope this all helps.

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Thanks for your comments so many months ago. I didn’t understand how Tiller works at the time, so some of your comments went right over my head. I signed up a couple weeks ago and understand what you were saying much better, now.

So far, Tiller appears to be head and shoulders above anything else I have used in the past and that, in part, is because it IS a spreadsheet and I can see more of what’s going on. I’m still nervous about the download processes… and there is an account at one of our institutions that it has not picked up on. I have 3 accounts there and only 2 show up, even though I can see them when I logon to that institution’s site myself. I WILL figure it out, though.

I very much appreciate the time you took to respond and I’ve seen some of your other comments on other threads in the community. Thanks, again!

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I would like to take a moment to say thanks for your response to my question a few months ago. It took me a while to decide to switch to Tiller, but I did that a couple weeks ago, and I’m glad I did. It is far better than Quicken and, with the addition of another spreadsheet provided by another member of the community, it is better than Mint, too. I’m still working on getting my “system” set up, but I’ll get to a place that is working for me. And I agree that the for me is important. My process, in the past, has been to export both Quicken and Mint data and try to make sense out of it in Excel. It was frustrating and I wondered why I was spending money on Quicken, when it did so little for me… primarily consolidating the data from multiple institutions.

Thanks, again, for your responses. I’m finding the discussions in the community to be both interesting and enlightening.

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@sblagoue thanks for starting this awesome discussion.

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