I’ve searched and haven’t found anything quite like this, so I’m reaching out to the Community. Any advice is welcome. First off, my Categories sheet is set up to track Savings in all Expense categories and the Budget amounts are populated for each month in each category.
Everything was working fine in January. In the Savings Budget sheet, at the end of January, all of my budget categories had a positive balance in the Available column. In February, instead of rolling over the Available funds in each category, the Savings column took the Actual spending for January and (incorrectly) turned it into negative Savings available for February. As a result, I now have many budget categories that show a negative balance in the Available column. It’s a mess and totally inaccurate.
Available End of January:
February Savings Column:
January - Actual Spending
I have no idea what’s gone wrong. Have I missed a step somewhere or do I need to start over with a new template?
Thanks in advance for any assistance,
Rebecca
Yikes. Somehow, it seems not to be recognizing whatever the budget was for each of those categories because it’s thinking those budgets are all $0.00 (and then your actual expenses put you in arrears in the Savings for the next month). Unfortunately, this reads to me like somehow something got messed up in the underlying formulas for your sheet, but I don’t know enough about those underlying formulas to advise you on how to fix it. Sorry. Hopefully, a spreadsheet wiz will chime in on this. . .
I appreciate your input, nonetheless. I suspect I’ll be retrieving my saved copy from December 2023 (when I joined Tiller) and doing a whole lot of copying and pasting into a new template.
I am wondering if everything got set up with the spreadsheet? I was looking at the description page: Savings Budget Spreadsheet - Tiller and wondering if you see the additional sheet and column described as:
" Tracking changes to savings rollovers requires an additional log sheet called Budget Journal. The add-to-spreadsheet process will also insert a sheet called Budget Journal into your spreadsheet.
Further, the installation will add a “Track” column to your Categories sheet where you can enable “Savings” functionality on a category-by-category basis."
So just confirming that the “Track” column is there in your Categories sheet and that the “Budget Journal” sheet was inserted as well?
Thank you, @Tom. The Budget Journal and Track column were there from the get-go.
I ended up creating an entirely new workbook from scratch and late last night, after many hours of tedium over two days, I finally finished recategorizing every transaction from January and February, splitting multiple transactions again, adding all of the Notes and Tags I’d used previously, and creating new AutoCat rules.
I’m very relieved to say that all of that was successful and I have a functional workbook again. I still don’t have any idea what corrupted my original but, obviously, something did. I’m just glad it happened relatively early in the year. Since I’ve only used Tiller since December, I can view this as good practice, but I fervently hope it doesn’t happen again.
