Question Self-employed or Innovative Tiller Users!

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#1

Hello, let me first start by saying I absolutely love using Tiller. The fact it can automatically pull in transactions from beyond a wide range of financial institutions brings me an exponential amount of joy. The automation of autocat and other amazing features also blows me away.

However, I am at a crossroad and am hoping to get some advice, tips, and or suggestions on managing both personal & business-related transactions.

I do love the functionality of Tiller and how impressive the pre-configured templates are, but my issue lately is deciding upon whether or not I can create the systematic approach to both my personal & business finances that I desire.

I currently have one spreadsheet that has all of my financial institutions, both personal & business, synced and automated together with the Tiller Money Feed.

Where I am looking for advice, tips, suggestions or thoughts is in two different areas.

The first is related to those who are self-employed or run their own business and my question is; how do you track your personal and business finances?

  • Do you use the same sheet?
  • Do you have a spreadsheet dedicated to personal finances and a separate one dedicated to business?
  • Or do you track your business transactions on an entirely different software in general?

The second area of topic may be a long shot, but I am curious whether or not anyone else has gone through extensive lengths to “tweak” your Tiller Spreadsheet for lack of better words.

  • What issues or things did you want to, still want too or end up changing to tweak your spreadsheet to fit your needs?
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#2

I’m not currently self-employed, but if I was, I’d likely create a number of categories relating to the business side of things, so you could separate out what you needed to see while keeping business and personal together. If that wasn’t enough, using tags could be another option. You’re best bet is to create a list of desired results you’d like to be able to see, and then look at how you could view them. The templates are infinitely customizable, either using some of the available ‘Solutions’, or through your own tweaks. I have a number of the add-on solutions installed, and I’ve also done a number of customizations on my own. Keep your eye on the “Show & Tell” area where people share some of their customizations. If you hit a wall, you could also detail a specific result you’re trying to accomplish in a ‘Help’ posting, there are at least a few people here that seem willing to go out of their way to develop and share innovative ways to use the technology to accomplish what you’re looking for.

#3

Glad to hear you’re excited about the tooling, @operatingwithorganiz!

I’ll build on @jpfieber’s great intro to the ecosystem with a few thoughts from personal experience…

I ran a consulting coming in Tiller for several years. I set up separate business and personal Tiller Money spreadsheets. This created two clean, independent pictures of our finances for my wife and me. This works pretty well since the categories and accounts are mostly different. At year end, we would allow access to both spreadsheets to our tax advisor and he figures the rest out.

If you want to put all the data into one spreadsheet, I agree with @jpfieber that tags could be a useful too.

I do customize my templates when they don’t do what I want out of the box. Sometimes, when they diverge far enough and seem to fill a gap for other users, I share them… like I did with the Budget Builder a few weeks ago.

Welcome to the community!