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:
- Categorizing my last 3 months worth of transactions that Tiller pulled in
- In the earliest month, starting each category off with whatever balance the envelope had immediately prior to the first downloaded transaction in Tiller
- 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.)