I came to Tiller in early December as a transplant from Mint and I’m very happy to have found Tiller. I’ve used the envelope method of budgeting for many years as a way to save monthly towards intermittent expenses like auto insurance and property taxes that come due at 3, 6, or 12-month intervals. The unspent funds each month continue to accumulate (roll over into successive months) so that the total due is already saved and available when the bill needs to be paid. After quite a bit of searching, I discovered the Savings Budget is what I needed to have this functionality and I’ve been using it for a week or so instead of Monthly Budget.
I have 2 questions:
(1) I will be starting a new Tiller spreadsheet for 2024 and want my savings from each category’s budget in December 2023 to roll over and be available in January 2024. Does anyone have a workflow for that scenario?
(2) Can I safely delete the Monthly Budget sheet since I’m no longer using it?
Hi, Rebecca. I’m a big fan of the Savings Budget sheet myself. For your first question, you can just add the savings to the new 2024 Savings Budget sheet. The money you add to savings doesn’t have to come from anywhere else, so you should just be able to transfer whatever the accumulated savings were at the end of 2023 into the new sheet.
As for your second question, I don’t see why not. I’m relatively new to Tiller myself, so I’ve been hiding, rather than deleting, anything for now until I’m totally sure I won’t need something. [Editing to refer to @bentyre1’s response below that suggests it could cause a problem with the yearly budget.]
For the second question i would second just hiding that particular sheet instead of deleting. It works in conjunction with the yearly budget sheet if I remember some troubleshooting previously to be correct. If you find yourself not wanting to use either the monthly or yearly budget sheets then yes they are safe to delete as they are just a “view” of your data
Thank you. To be clear, are you saying I should add the December category savings + January’s category budget amounts and then use that total as the budgeted amount for January?
Gotcha. Hiding the Monthly Savings sheet makes sense; thanks! I made a copy of my 2023 Savings Budget today and began creating 2024 but, because it’s a copy, all the months are labeled 2023. A warning popped up when I tried to edit. Do you have any guidance to share on that?
Rebecca
No. I would leave the budgeted amount alone. I would just add the carryover savings to the savings for January. The toggle at the top of the Savings Budget sheet allows you to choose if you are adding/subtracting savings or budget. That way you can continue to accrue savings on top of whatever you’re carrying over from 2023.
Are you trying to edit the original or the copy? I haven’t started my 2024 setup yet, but I believe that you want to make the copy your archive copy and reset the original for 2024 as only that sheet is properly linked to your account. Not sure if that would help with the issue you are having…
Aha! I wasn’t sure about the purpose of the +/- at the top of the sheet. I’ve still got a lot to learn.
I’ll double check tomorrow when I rewatch Wednesday’s webinar video about setting up for 2024, but I think Heather suggested making a copy of 2023 and deleting the old data in it if we didn’t want to add 12 columns and continue using the same one for 2023 and 2024. Fortunately, there’s plenty of time for me to change course if need be!
Yes, that’s correct. As I read your email, I thought you were suggesting you were going to make the copy your working sheet for 2024, which wouldn’t work so well. There’s a video from a few years ago walking through the Savings Budget sheet up on YouTube.
Thank you for pointing me to the video. Wednesday’s webinar was focused on the Foundation template and basic budgeting, which I don’t need. They didn’t have answers to the few questions raised about Savings Budget and referred those to Community Solutions. I was under the impression that Savings Budget is an optional add-on tool, but apparently Tiller considers it a separate entity.
I’ll probably stick with Tiller instead of switching to a different product when my free trial expires but, as a newbie, it’s taken a lot of time and digging to find answers about using Tiller to work for envelope budgeting, especially when naming conventions have changed and there doesn’t seem to be a “one-stop shop” resource. I read dozens of Q&As here before my lightbulb moment that Savings Budget and whatever they called it before were one and the same.
Partially. The suggestion to hide, rather than delete, the Monthly Budget sheet solved that question, and the links to the resources that give an overview of using the Savings Budget were very helpful. I figured out how to change the year to 2024 on the copy I made myself. Heather covered it in the Getting Ready for 2024 webinar and I didn’t catch it until I viewed it again. All that was required was editing cell F1 in the formula bar for the Categories sheet. The suggestion to use the +/- to carry over category savings from December 2023 into January 2024 also seems to be a solution, but I won’t know for certain until I start using the 2024 template.
Did you consider using the same document and just adding another year in there? That way, the Savings Budget for each rollover category automatically rolls over to January '24. It also makes it really easy to be able to pull up data from past years/compare to past years all in the same document. It was incredibly easy to set it up this way.
Hi Rebecca, I have been using the Savings budget for 6 months. Like you I was seeking a envelope style option that would accrue dollars over time like for Christmas fund, or holding funds to pay a 6-month bill (call saving, but I like to say building - vs saving for trip). It took me a while and some hunting to learn it. I like Tiller and intend to continue my membership as its preferable to any others I’ve tried ( and that’s a lot of them, including YNAB). I just wanted to point something out - you may be doing it but thought to mention it. The idea with moving to 2024 - is 1) to create a copy (now you have original 2023 and copy with 2023). Leave the copy alone and so its your saved or archived 2023. 2) edit the original to change the year to 2024 in the F1 on Cat sheet. The Saving sheet will give drop down for dates that exist in transactions (I think). 3) option to delete the rows in Transaction sheet that are for 2023. Since this is the original - the next time it updates it will “keep going” and will get next year coming in. (if you try to switch to the copy for being your 2024 sheet, you will have to reset with the bank for incoming transactions). Also, recommend edit to name of sheet for the year.
Thanks, Matt. I considered it but it wasn’t practical because I just transitioned from Mint and only the transactions got uploaded into Tiller. None of the “saved” budget amounts in Mint transferred over and, frankly, Mint screwed up so much of their budgeting functionality in recent months that’s probably for the best. I also whittled down my number of categories, so all of that has resulted in false overages for 2023 in Tiller. I needed to make a fresh start.
Hi Wendy,
Thank you so much for your detailed explanation; it makes perfect sense and it will be convenient to not reset the banks. Based on what I thought I understood from the “Ready, Set, New Year: Tips for Optimizing Your Tiller spreadsheets for 2024” webinar, I did the opposite: I made a copy of 2023, deleted the transactions, and edited the copy instead of the original, thinking I needed to maintain the 2023 sheet until we were living in the 2024 world. I’ve learned a lot these past couple of weeks, though, so it will be easy to do the 2024 setup again.
Thanks again. I appreciate your input very much.
Rebecca
Hi, I saw your suggestion to Rebecca and I’m in the same boat as her although I have enough 2023 data in Tiller that it would make sense to “add another year in there,” as you state. I’d like some clarification on what you mean by this. My near-term solution is to do what Rebecca did and archive my 2023 savings budget and create a fresh 2024 sheet carrying over my savings from December. This seems to work fine, but I want to know if I’m missing something that would simplify the process.
, 