Setting up Businesses in Tiller

Hello - I have 2 businesses. I just painstakingly reconciled 2020 in my quickbooks accounts for both.

I would like to close out both quickbooks accounts and move both my businesses to Tiller. I found 2 articles - SB Comprehensive Guide and Business dashboard

I currently have all of my personal accounts in 1 google sheet. While my business accounts are with the same bank as my personal, I am not pulling the business data into my personal sheet.

I could not determine from either article if its best for me to add the dashboard and business accounts to the existing sheet or create a new sheet? Should each business have its own sheet?

I also do not see from the articles listed how I might be able to have business and personal mixed into 1 sheet.

The businesses have different categories from each other and also have different categories from my personal file.

Would love some guidance here. I am sure there is probably an “it depends” to this question.

What I will say is that Tiller has relieved an immense amount of time and stress by having all of my personal accounts in 1 place. I used quicken for years, but I could never get my retirement accounts from 2 of the 4 places into them. Now I have everything in tiller. WOW!

I would have no issue with 3 sheets 1) Personal 2) Bus 1 3) Bus 2

It would be an improvement.

Thanks for the help.

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Great questions, @abilityto.

Personally, I would (and do) have separate sheets for business and personal accounts. You can unify your feeds under a single Tiller Money subscription, but I’d recommend creating discrete spreadsheets and only linking the accounts that are relevant into each one.

Regarding your TWO businesses, unless there are overlaps (e.g. credit card payments) or efficiencies in putting them together, I’d recommend creating a discrete spreadsheet for each— especially if the Categories are different. The Business Dashboard, for example, will only work well with a single instance installed in the spreadsheet (making it difficult to manage two businesses.

Hope this helps.
Randy

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@abilityto

Funny you ask. I spent the last month or so doing this very thing. I have them all in one sheet, as I only had one sheet available.

I have personal, Schedule C, Schedule E#1, and Schedule E#2. I got historical data from many many sources so I have complete data for at least all of 2019 and 2020. You will not be able to use the Business Dashboard if you go this route but in no way was this a deal breaker.

Each Schedule E has, lets say, 10 units. I am tracking everything by unit. You will need some pivot tables and sheet manipulation to organize and combine things together in a meaningful way.

So, it can be done, but would require an experienced user.

Thanks,

Blake

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Hi Randy, thanks for your feedback as I was looking for some info on how to manage personal and business.

Are you saying it’s possible to manage both under one Tiller subscription? I am stuck trying to figure out to how to do that from the Tillerhq platform and my Google sheet Tiller template. How would I link and unlink the accounts I want for biz only within the same Tiller workbook?

If I only have 1 business. Am I able to add biz sheets to this workbook and pick and choose which accts I want linked and unlinked to these added biz sheets? If so, I am stuck on how to do that.

Based on the way you are asking the question, @soldbychantelh, it sounds like you want to look at your personal and business finances discretely— it sounds like you want to quickly switch between accounts and views in the same spreadsheet. In this case, creating two separate spreadsheets is best.

There are Hide columns in the Accounts and Categories sheets that allow you to programmatically hide some accounts and categories from some reports and templates, but, while you could build your own formulas and workflows to automate this, these aren’t really designed for fast switching out of the box.

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.

Hi Randy, thanks for getting back to me. So it sounds like I am better off having an entirely separate workbook/or template for my business then. I am trying to avoid complicating things but I do mix up some of my biz and personal expenses on the same cards.

I think you’re better off with two spreadsheets. If you try to preserve matching column order in your Transactions sheet between the two spreadsheets, you can copy and paste Feeds transactions pretty effortlessly.

Hi all - piggybacking on this thread…I have two spreadsheets - one for business and one for personal. This way I can easily track everything separately and don’t have to worry about mixing anything up.

However, my question for @randy and/or others is…if all my income is in one spreadsheet (business) what’s the best way to actually create a budget / spending tracker with no “income” in my personal spreadsheet? Is there a way to create a tab that pulls data from one spreedsheet to another? e.g. pull in Income from “business” sheet into the personal Spending Trends tab?

Hi @vilibara this is an interesting question. I think if you’re not paying yourself (so your personal sheet has no income) it might be better to just put everything in one sheet so you see the income. There isn’t a way to pull that income into the personal sheet otherwise.

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I feel your pain, @vilibara. It seems like a simple problem but I’m not coming up with any clever solutions. An IMPORTRANGE() seems like it could help but you don’t want linked data in a discrete sheet, you want new rows in your Transactions sheet. And linking the account to your personal sheet is could overwhelm your personal finances with business stuff.

Here is a (little bit hacky) idea… What if you link the business account with the income to your personal sheet… Then, in your personal sheet, create an Autocat rule that categorizes everything that is not a paycheck (e.g. filter on business account name, positive amount, and more than $1,000) as “DELETE ME”, then have a workflow where you occasionally filter on the DELETE ME rows and… well… delete the cruft.

Other than this, I think you could create an end-of-month workflow where you manually add a transaction to your personal sheet with the appropriate income amount from the prior period in your business sheet.

Hope this helps…

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Thanks @heather and @randy. Appreciate the responses. @randy I like your suggestion re: bringing in income only. I’ll continue to play with ideas and see what works best.