Dear Tiller users,
Do you prefer having a separate sheet for each year or one sheet with multiple years?
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This is our 3rd year using Tiller. We use it only for tracking expenses and setting a budget for the upcoming year. This year I will save off a copy of our sheet as a 2023 archive. Then set up the current sheet for 2024. So, same sheet for us. When I did this at the end of 2022 I had some trouble with some of the worksheets (IIRC, Yearly budget, monthly budget sheets). I need to go back and find the list of end of year/start of year updates that are required to prepare the sheet for the next year.
I have all of 2019-2023 in one sheet. It is/was nice to have all the history there. BUT this year, my life and finances are far more simple so Iām retiring the old sheet and starting a new one for 2024.
Soā¦ both 
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Have you seen any deterioration in the speed/performance of Tiller with that much data? The Tiller folks warn that things start to slow down after 2-3 years in one sheet, depending on the complexity of your set-up, but it seems like some folks stick with one sheet for longer than that. Iād prefer to stay in one sheet for the historical tracking reasons you reference.
Great question. Iāve been running two sheets - the old one and then new one for a few weeks now. (Iāll delete all the pre-2024 transactions next week.) The ONLY speed difference I see in the āfillā process. The new, streamlined sheet, finishes the fill in about half the time. BUT, once the data is in, honestly, I see no diff in speed and agility.
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I like to have multiple years in one spreadsheet, currently at 6 years, ~5000 transactions. Performance is snappy
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Youāre lean and mean. I only have four months of data in Tiller, and I already have ~1000 transactions. 
Hopefully, itāll hold up over time.
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Yeah, it helps to indicate number of transactions, because that varies per person/household.
I donāt connect investment accounts, so that helps keep transactions lower. And, yeah, Iām not generally making lots of transactions.
To help keep transactions lower, I decided to not use the Amazon CSV import workflow, because that creates a new transaction for each item, plus an offset transaction. Itās pretty slick to be able to have all that itemized detail, but I find I donāt really need all that in my transactions list.
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Good point. My multi year sheet has 12,814 transactions and itās Sheets (not Excel). But, still, after the data is in, itās pretty snappy still. Itās just the data feed that is slower.
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At my current rate, 12,800 would be about 15 years of transactions for me
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I keep 2 yearsā worth of transactions in a single sheet. For context, my '22-'23 sheet has about 6400 transactions. Things get pretty slow if I keep much more in a single sheet.
Each year Iāll copy my sheet and initialize it for the next year, so my next sheet will be '23-'24. Because I use the Savings Budget workflows, I have to seed my category savings with each categoryās most recent Budget Journal entry up to December 31, 2022. Finally, Iāll unlink my '22-'23 sheet from the Tiller console, making it an archive that will no longer receive new transactions. Other than that, the process isnāt any different than adding a new year to a sheet.
Out of curiosity, how do you handle categorizing Amazon transactions with them being so disparate? Iāve been at a crossroads since Amazon discontinued the export feature.
I do split transactions, as needed. Often times when I get multiple things, they actually belong to the same category and so I either donāt need to split, or the split is fewer transactions than the one transaction per item Amazon import workflow.
Just checking youāre aware of the Update on Importing Amazon Orders into Google Sheets (May 2023)? So, the privacy central service is the new export.
I like to keep transactions in a single sheet. What I do is create pivot tables for each year so that way I am looking at each year separately while still being able to compare expenses year to year.
I make a new sheet each year. I dabble in the credit card rewards game and I like to only have my current accounts in the sheet.
Iāve been using Tiller since 2017 so another reason this came to be is that many new budget/sheet templates have been published over the years and it was easiest to start with/import only the current year. Performance has significantly improved since then too, when I would hit the āyour sheetās getting to bigā warnings.
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I use 1 sheet for everything, with the exception of my investment accounts. I do not require all of the transactions for that but I do import the balances from another sheet daily. I have been a user since 2018 and have 20k+ transactions in my sheet and it runs fine. Once I reach the 7-year mark I will delete data as it is no longer required by the IRS. As for viewing my data, I have enhanced the dashboard so that I can toggle between Tags, business, personal, investment property, and taxes. Still love this dynamic product.
I too like to have MULTIPLE YEARS in one spreadsheet, currently at 20 years, ~46000 transactions. I imported all data from the past manually (Mint, Quicken export, Bank feeds in Excel etc) into ONE sheet to easily find any transaction of interest since 2004.
I donāt use the sheet for budgeting purpose at all but for keeping track of income and expenses for tax purposes. The Categories sheet allows me to define what I want to āHideā (such as transfers) so only items of interest show up in P&L sheet. I also enter Tax statements I receive (1099-K, 1009-INT, W-2, 1099-G) as totals in the Transactions sheet and mark them as āHideā in Categories. This way I know what IRS has in their records and what my P&L reflects. I also login to IRS and get my transcripts for each year to know what has been reported to them so I donāt unintentionally omit some statement if it got misplaced in the mail and didnāt reach me.
I created a Pivot table that shows years as column and Categories as rows so am able to see totals for each category for each year since 2004. I use Tiller for feed purposes only and have added several columns for my own use. BTW, you can edit the Tiller sheet freely as long as you donāt mess with Tiller supported columns and formulae. I have added vacation items as 1-line items in Transaction sheet as tickler reminder of all vacations I have taken in past 20 years! Works great using āTransaction Trackerā community solution.
I am able to file business taxes easily as my data is now real time and the āLive Profit & Lossā sheet from the community solution provides category totals for any year. Works great and the performance is snappy.
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I will do it by year. I used Mint for about 10 years and did the samething. Seperating it makes it easier to organize spending for doing our taxes.
Iām team new sheet. It gives me a chance to start fresh. I look back at the older sheets and see what categories made sense, what can I change, adjust income/budget amounts etc.
I also like to look back at my old sheets and see how my net worth has changed via the Balances sheet. Or just spending habits in general. Like looking through old journals 
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All that youāre doing sounds great- Iām going to work on these items. Thanks for sharing!
Dennis Johnson