All on one sheet for me. I have 9 years of transactions (over 24,000 rows) and performance is acceptable…
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I look forward to the dueling Tiller t-shirt swag being offered: choose either “Team New Sheet” or “Team One Sheet.” 
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I mean, minimum 2 years to be able to do previous 12 months or year-to-year comparison reports, right?
And, don’t you wanna see how much you’ve spent on groceries over the last 10 years all in one go? 
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I have only been using tiller for a few months, but I have had my own spreadsheet for several years. I have one for each year. So, i am continuing that pattern. I go back to last years’ spreadsheet when I need to.
I like having history at my fingertips, as long as there is no degradation in the speed of importing and analysis, etc. Makes tax season much, much, much easier!
Does this work? Rename my existing sheet, which contains 2021-2023 transactions, and then archive it. Then, delete all transactions occurring prior to 1/1/2024 to effectively start a new sheet for the new year. It would seem to eliminate the need to start a new sheet and re-create accounts, categories, auto categories, etc.
Thanks.
Well, I think this is precisely the process that Tiller recommends for those wanting a new sheet, so yes, I suppose. 
I have a new worksheet for each year but I have 1 worksheet with all the transactions, copied from each of the prior year worksheets.
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I also like having as much history as possible. I have a single sheet with 5 years’ worth of transactions: ~11,000 lines. Performance seems reasonable. At the start of each year I make an archived copy just to have a backup, but I keep using the same sheet for the new year. I have a budget category table where I can plug in any of the 5 years and it shows the category sums just for that year. In other tabs, such as for investments, I’ll make a new column each year for a per-year value, and I have a net worth per year graph on another tab. So some tabs are multi-year, and others give a configurable single-year view.
No need to rename the existing sheet, just “Make A Copy” under the File menu item. This creates a backup copy and then you can delete transactions in existing sheet to start the new year.
As a good practice, one should always “Name Current Version” under “File → version history” just in case you ever need to go back to a sane copy after things go wrong. Google always saves versions but its kind of harder to know which version to revert to. The Named version makes it easy.
Thanks very much. Very helpful.
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One sheet for personal, business, taxes, investment properties is remarkable to me. I’m new to Tiller and came here for personal accounting. We use Stessa for investment properties and while it is robust, personal accounting was challenging on Stessa. And now I am finding investment properties a challenge on Tiller!
Can you offer any encouraging words or suggestions on how to incorporate both investments properties and personal onto one Tiller sheet?
I am curious how many properties you are tracking? It is important to know that tiller has its limits but I continually find ways to make it work. This is a partial screenshot. This comes from out of the box thinking on how to make the dashboard console work better for me. In the categories tab , I added a column called tags. Then I modified the dashboard to filter by those tags, personal, business, investment, tax and investment property (I have one)
The nuance is when it comes to labeling the category. Since !electric! Is already used for personal house the name needs to be different !electric-! And when categorizing transactions you need to remember which electric goes with each property. So multiple properties could be cumbersome. But the cool part is filtering by month, by year, etc. income isn’t shown in this example since I have not collected rent on this unit.
I absolutely love the dashboard since everything is all in one page and I can toggle between tags. I had been asking for this since 2018, finally the put something out that I could adapt to my liking.
This makes sense. Thanks Chris. We have 7. As a start, in order to separate bus (properties) I & E from personal I & E, I simply made a category bus income and another one bus expense. To further refine it seems too cumbersome on Tiller but it’s a start. The details are on Stessa so I’m good with this system for now. Maybe one day…
Your screenshot didn’t load but your description was great.
Thank you.
Great discussion, everyone. I’m for all of my data in one place so I have a single spreadsheet with 25k+ transactions. It’s still going strong though I try to avoid having too many complicated support templates installed.
Tying a few threads together… a few power users had some suggestions here to optimize spreadsheet performance.
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Here’s an idea to:
- keep multiple years all in one spreadsheet
- keep performance fast
- use lots of templates
Usually, these would be contradictory.
But you can create another spreadsheet, and use IMPORTRANGE() to import the transactions, categories, and balance history of the main sheet. Then on this new spreadsheet, you can go to town with as many templates as you like. And it won’t impact performance on the master, multi-year sheet.
For me, i keep each year as a separate Google Sheet. But i also importrange() import all the transactions from all years into a master, multi-year transactions sheet.
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What if the Tiller Foundation had a provision to do both. In the Website world of Wordpress, you can have a theme for your site, and then a child that inherits many features from the parent theme. But, it also allows you to make changes to the child that don’t get overwritten by changes to the parent. It is helpful to note that the things that are typically changed in a child theme typically change the look and feel, things like colors, spacing, and the like. What you want to inherit are improvements to functionality.
How could this work for Tiller? Use the Foundation concept! Make Foundation the parent. Allow “child” sheets to inherit categories (and other sheets) from Foundation, but make it so that if the “child” also has an entry in the categories sheet, that is the same as the Foundation, but has different designations, then the child over-rules.
To tie everything together, create a “Master” dashboard that allows you to open and close various years as needed. In this “Master” sheet, designate what sheet is to get current fill data from linked accounts.
I’ve been an Excel spreadsheet guy for a long time, and my wife has created massive spreadsheets for a Fortune 50 company. However, I’m going to explore these ideas on the Google side of things because I am leaning away from Microsoft on the personal side.
On a slight tangent, I was happy to see folks talking about using Tiller for business. I will be exploring ways to use Tiller to keep track of my personal accounts and my business accounts. I hope that in the process I can do a better job of keeping things properly aligned, both for the accounting and tax purposes.
I have several years of data in my Transactions sheet, but then I have the Live Profit and Loss sheet duplicated and configured each one to show a different year of data. I also adapted the Live Profit and Loss to show a full year in one column, so I have the full annual numbers lined up across all years. Very interesting to see at a glance how expenses have changed overall and also at the more granular levels year over year! And much prettier than a pivot table 
If you search the forum, I’ve also written about my Amazon hack of how to get all your purchase details to import directly into the Transactions description directly without any importing. You might find it helpful if you want to categorize Amazon more easily!