I’m having an issue with the Savings Budget template from Tiller Community Solutions. What is the best way to make sure all $’s in accounts are budgeted?
By default the Savings Budget gets all it’s budget info from the Categories sheet, so as long as every category has a budget set, and every transaction gets categorized, you should have everything covered.
I guess Im confused. We budget income for the current month and budget expenses each of the categories on the category worksheet.
The income is received throughout the month and may not be received when the expense is entered/paid by the bank.
I have sufficient funds to in my bank accounts to cover the current month, so Im not sure how to handle this other than put the excess funds in category savings.
Coming from YNAB these funds were kept in Ready to Assign or in a Future Income category, then moved to Ready to Assign at the beginning of the month.
Any suggestions?
Can you help us understand further? I’m a bit confused by the scenario.
For example, if your monthly income is $10K, are you simply not putting $10K in your income categorie(s) every month? And then budgeting your total monthly expenses across all expense categories?
For most people, you get your paycheck deposited in your checking account, and it sits there until it gets used via expenses. I don’t understand the excess funds part of this? Are you trying to categorize your income even further until it gets debited against?
If income is 10,000 and monthly expenses are 7,000 where does the remaining 3,000 go? From a YNAB perspective every dollar gets budgeted or Remains in Available to Budget.
No where. It stays in Income. I’m not sure why you need to recategorize it or move it somewhere else? That’s why I’m confused but I might not understand your use case since I’ve never used YNAB.
I’ve tried a lot of tools except for YNAB and I’ve never recategorized Income when it deposited. Not saying you are wrong; I just don’t understand.
Thought more about this…maybe you just mean what to do with any surplus month to month? I do one of four things with that $3K:
- Let it ride in Income going forward.
- Transfer it to online savings account.
- Invest it.
- Move it to an expense category I call “Spending Buffer” which basically becomes a floating dollar amount that I carry forward from month to month and pull from as needed. It’s almost like an emergency savings within your checking account.
Admittedly my #1 and #4 are a little redundant. Should probably just go all-in on one or the other.
I think maybe you mean something like #4?
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Thanks. Im trying #4. I need to transition from YNAB and train my mind the “new” workflow.
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Hi @billpiper - curious what you’re doing now? I’m coming from YNAB too and am finding it hard to get started with the savings budget because what is the dollar amount I’m starting from and how do I know that corresponds with actual dollars in my accounts?
Just curious what you’re doing now that it’s been a while.
Hey @nicoleg,
I’m curious if you have your Savings Budget up and running. It sounds like you were comfortable with the mechanics of the workflow and template but unsure of how to set your start values.
I think how you start depends on how you want to track (virtual) savings:
- Consider a fresh start.
- Port the rollover values you had from YNAB.
- If you want your total virtual/savings rollovers in the template to true up to a real-world savings account balance, consider spreading the total amount of the real-world balance across the savings categories for your start value.
There is some documentation in the community on setting a start month (in the hidden area) and setting start values for your savings categories. Let us know if you have any issues getting those set up.
Randy
Not quite but I’m still working on it. I’m on my 3rd attempt now. The things that don’t work for me are:
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How to exlcude certain accounts from the budget sheet. Me and chatGPT are getting cozy on this one, I can’t quite get there yet but I haven’t given up. Why accounts? Because I don’t want it to include all my retirement and investment account data, I also have a small biz account that I don’t want to include, and I also monitor my kids accounts (they’re 12 and 14) that I don’t want it to include. I’ve created a column on the accounts tab called “hide from budget” (rather than hide from reports, because I want those items included in the report, just not the budget). But haven’t yet figured out how to filter those things out.
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I also need to figure out how to include only certain tags from the transactions sheet. I got help in a prior support article for including tags in the Live P&L, but the budget sheet is so different that I can’t yet figure out how to translate it. (but I haven’t given up!).
Those two are my current blockers.
After I figure those out, then I will attempt to roughly match account balances to the budget sheet. The above two are blockers to using it, this last account balance isn’t a blocker but a major hindrance. In YNAB, this is easy, and crucial. You start with the actual dollars you have (so porting those numbers over to Tiller is very easy), but making sure they stay on track is the hard part. The balance matching is pretty important to ensure I’m not under budgeting ‘virtual’ dollars - I need to budget ACTUAL dollars. Unless my credit card company is willing to take virtual dollars as a payment…
Thanks for checking in - and if you have any guidance on 1 or 2, I’m all ears!
It sounds like you are making some progress, @nicoleg.
Generally, the Savings Budget workflow is not integrated with accounts and balances (as it looks like you’ve learned). We have a Savings and Debt solution that might help make this connection… though I think it heads into the “virtual dollars” domain that you are not excited about.
Thanks Randy - one edit that might make the savings budget a lot more useful - is there a way to filter by account?
Hear me out - many of us have MANY different accounts for different purposes, (kids checking accounts, retirement accounts, savings accounts, etc) and the noise of all those transactions in the savings budget is one area that’s making it really hard. Additionally some of us have business accounts linked, which further complicates it. Really, we probably have 2-3 accounts that serve as our regular operating budget accounts (with some room for transfers between accounts when appropriate). The challenge is the savings budgets includes all accounts, all transactions, when really we just need to look at our core.
I was trying to solve this challenge by figuring out how to filter the savings budget by tags, but that’s proven very hard because it’s not a workflow you all have truly integrated into the other sheets, and I’m not quite smart enough to figure it out. (And I tried). The categories tab has a ‘hide from reports’ feature, but that’s not quite it either because I want those categories to appear in other reports.
What I would love is to filter by account. I’m wondering if there’s a way to add a column to the accounts tab that says “hide from budget”, and if that box is set to hide, then the savings budget won’t include any transactions from that account?
If I did that, then actually it gets a LOT easier to turn these from virtual dollars into real dollars - because I’m only looking at a handful of accounts. Or at least get darn close.
What if you set up a separate sheet that just includes the accounts that you want on the Savings Budget? Make that your Savings Budget sheet. And then maybe a separate sheet for your business accounts? Your Business accounts sheet. Etc. My sense is that lots of people adopt this method to deal with investment transactions (i.e., put all of those in a separate Investment sheet). I realize that’s not the solution you’re looking for, but I’m guessing this could be accomplished more quickly than we’re likely to see the additions you’ve suggested.
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There are about a half dozen reasons that approach won’t work for me (end result is more work), which is why I’m trying to do it this way.
Ok. Just trying to be helpful. Good luck figuring it out.