Rollovers just keep adding new budgeted amount, not leftover available amount (confused new user trying to migrate from Mvelopes)

Google Sheets
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Hello — I’m trying to move over to Tiller from Mvelopes, and I’m getting very confused by how the rollover budgeting feature is supposed to work.

I tried to start by:

  1. Categorizing my last 3 months worth of transactions that Tiller pulled in
  2. In the earliest month, starting each category off with whatever balance the envelope had immediately prior to the first downloaded transaction in Tiller
  3. Replicating budget allocations for those 3 months based on how I had funded envelopes in Mvelopes

Then I ran “Analyze Budgets History”. My idea was that each category would have a “starting balance” of where it was in Mvelopes prior to the history of transactions Tiller would have, and then categorizing transactions, budgeting for categories, plus rollovers should have all added up to so that present-day “Available” funds would match Mvelopes envelope balances.

But this totally hasn’t worked for me.

The rollovers make sense from the first month going into the second month, but then the next month, they don’t make sense at all. Let me provide an example:

I have a category “Local Transportation”.

  • In Mvelopes, the balance before the first Tiller transaction was $14.04. I added this as rollover.
  • Then I budgeted $100 for July.
  • In July, I have categorized transactions as “Local Transportation” totalling to $76.82
  • The July “Local Transportation” line in the Budget Dashboard reads:
    $14.04 + $100 - $77 = $37 (Rollover + Budget - Actual = Available)
  • For August, I expect a rollover of $37 (prior months unspent “available”) — but what I get is a rollover of $114.04 (Rollover + Budget from July)

Additionally, when I check the “Budgets History” sheet, all the Budget, Rollover, and Rollover Mods lines have amouns that make sense, but all the Actual lines have $0.00 across the board, despite me having categorized all the transactions. I even tried manually entering the $76.82 actual amount for July into the “Budgets History” sheet and then run “Analyze Budgets History” again, but it just overwrote that number with zeros.

Is something going wrong on my sheet? Or is this how rollover is actually supposed to work? Any help would be much appreciated.

(@heather I see you providing very helpful answers on other envelope budgeting questions, so I’m tagging you in the hopes you can help here.)

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I’m experiencing the same issue when trying to move from YNAB4 to tiller. I assumed that it wasn’t working as expected because I was trying to set budgets and rollovers for past months.

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@paul.dunwoody — have you stuck with it past a month to see if it’s better going forward and this is only a problem with trying to match up transactions from past periods? Part of the challenge here is trying to evaluate Tiller within the 30-day window to see if I can actually reliably use it for envelope-style budgeting.

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Not yet. I’m in that 30-day window as well.

1 Like
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I’m sorry we don’t have the tool working properly for you, @samuel.sawyer and @paul.dunwoody.

I’m doing a little debug in the scripts and I think I see what is going on…

I think the script is reading Transactions-sheet dates as type string. We use a javascript new Date() call to convert them into type datetime but it is misinterpreting strings such as 8/1/19 as datetime August 1, 1919. I believe this is why your actuals aren’t being properly captured by the envelope budgeting tool— i.e. they are being applied to the wrong century!

This shouldn’t be happening and I will work on fix.

In the interim, please try this for me…

  1. Select the entire “Date” column in your Transactions sheet
  2. Apply the 9/26/2008 date format via the Format/Number menu
  3. Run Analyze Budgets History

Let me know if things are working better.

Thanks for your patience with this.
Randy

2 Likes
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Thanks, @randy — this solved this problem nicely for the time being. I hope you’re able to figure out how to get the script to read the transactions dates as dates (or at least to get the string parse rules to work the same way as Google sheets formatting thinks about them).

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Thanks, that worked for me too.