I’m having an issue with the Savings Budget template from Tiller Community Solutions.
Apologies if this is frowned upon, but created a new discussion thread to highlight the question for the Savings Budget folks.
I’m attempting to move over from several years on YNAB and have a number of savings goals and annual bills that I’ve been allocating funds monthly toward for some portion of the last year. These dollars sit in my savings account balance.
With attempting to move to Tiller in January, how do I setup the budget planner so that I can allocate some portion of the Savings account toward these categories and not have everything starting at zero? Attempting to do this manually for January (and having the Budget template take effect in February) is resulting in negative cashflow projections for the month.
I would set the “Adjust ± Modifies” setting at the top to “Savings”. Then add the amount you’ve saved up in each category as a positive number. Then go to Extensions\Tiller Community Solutions\Tools\Update Savings Budget and it should add this amount to your “Savings” column for each category.
I too came from YNAB to Tiller and had the same issue. I could never make the numbers add up, especially when I was starting mid year and using transactions from Jan 1.
I’ll play around with jpfieber’s suggestion and see if I can make it work.
Ultimately, I wrote an entirely new spreadsheet that used Tiller Sync that accounted for goals in the same way that YNAB did. This is why I like Tiller so much. If you don’t like something, change it! (but you have to be able to figure out how sheets and Excel work!)
I am waiting for somebody to create a true Envelope budget for Excel like @richl has done for Sheets.
Recognizing I’m reviving an old thread here (but figure it’s better to keep conversations together rather than starting new ones?).
I am also coming from a combo of YNAB and Quickbooks (I run my own small business, all flows through to my individual tax return) and the benefits of having all the transactions in one place has been HUGE. I’m loving Tiller!
But I too am struggling with the savings budget coming from YNAB. YNAB literally changed how we viewed and spent and invested our money, I went from having credit card debt ALL THE TIME to never having it because of this notion of ‘assign every dollar a job’.
The savings budget here has sooo much potential, but it is virtually impossible to get set up from the start. What’s the starting value? Yes I see you can tweak each funding account, but since I don’t know how much I’m starting with, it’s been nearly impossible to get it right.
IMHO, there are 3 things missing to make this sheet useful:
Which accounts you want to include for ‘funding’. You should be able to exclude accounts.
The dollars in those accounts to start with, so that you can then ‘assign’ them to categories. You can currently assign, but there’s no way to really see how much you’re working with, so you have no way of knowing if your envelopes are accurate or not.
The ability to exclude some categories from the budget. Yes I see you can ‘hide from report’ but it’s a universal setting to all reports, and actually I want to see some of the categories in the reports like the P&L report, but not have those categories included in the budget.
I’ve been playing with Richl’s tool too, but man it is complex, it’s a lot of sheets, and I’m starting discouraged because it’s throwing errors. I’m putting the work in to figure it out, but gah I wish this was all easier.
Anyway, just some feedback on how to get the savings budget template to AWESOME.
I’m a big fan of the Savings Budget and happy to try to help. The first thing I’d note is that there aren’t really “funding accounts” with the Savings Budget. The sheet isn’t tied to account balances at all. The only inputs are transactions and budgets. My goal with the Savings Budget is to have actual income equal budgeted expenses. If my actual income exceeds my real expenses, then I’ll budget any excess income to a savings goal using the adjust +/- budget. If you want to adjust the savings in any category, including giving a category a starting savings value, use the adjust +/- savings. Hope that helps.
Thank you - the reason this doesn’t work for me is because I get paid only a few times a year. My monthly ‘budget’ will ALWAYS be more than my monthly income, and I’m starting with a wad of cash in my accounts that needs to last me for a few months. And I use multiple accounts to accomplish this heroic feat.
The adjust +/- savings is hard simply because I’m trying to figure out what the starting balance is, then allocate that appropriately across categories. I’d like some ongoing check to make sure my savings budget is close to my account balances. I’d like a way to exclude some accounts (or ideally tags - which would have the same effect for me) from the budget savings. I’m trying hard to become a google sheets wizard to write these custom myself but have a very long way to go.
Yeah, unfortunately, I think some of that is beyond what the Savings Budget is constructed to do. But the good news is that Tiller can be modified to suit your purposes if you’re adept enough with Google Sheets. Good luck.
Nicole in the envelopes budget you got from me. You can take current income and fund future months with it. Your envelope balance will only show the current amounts. This allows you to only spend a set amount each month.