My partner and I put most of our Living expenses onto one credit card, and then split the bill at the end of the month. However, I use my own individual Tiller account that pulls in all of my other individual bills. This makes the budgeting and Insights way off for my groceries, utilities, etc, all of which are double due to the shared credit card. Would the only way to fix this be to manually enter all of these transactions as 50% of the amount instead of auto feed from the bank? Or does anyone have another suggestion?
For expenses I split with my partner, I split the transaction and then assign my portion a budgeted category and assign my partnerâs portion a âTransferâ type category so it doesnât affect my budgeted categories. The category I use is called âVenmo Requestedâ. When my partner pays me back, I also categorize that transaction âVenmo Requestedâ, resulting in net zero transfers in that category.
The amount Iâm owed in a month is aggregated into the âNet Transfersâ on my Budget tab.
When that number reaches 0, I know that Iâm all settled up for the month. Sometimes I need to change the transaction date for the payback transaction if I charged my partner one month, and they donât pay me back until after the first of the next month. Because of this, you can see that Iâve gotten into the habit of putting the transaction date from my split transactions into my Venmo Requests so they show up in the description and I donât have to look up the original transaction date to backdate transactions.
I use several other Transfer categories in this way. For example:
- Reimbursement: expenses you expect to be reimbursed for like a merchandise return or reimbursements from work
- ATM fee: My bank reimburses me for ATM fees and I like to make sure they actually do that
Once you use multiple transfer categories like this, the aggregated Net Transfers number isnât so useful, especially if you want to see a breakdown of how much youâre owed in previous months or for specific transfer categories. To see that detail, I like to use the Simple Business Dashboard which has helpful charts like this:
You can see that my graph currently tells me that Iâm owed about $60 for April and $13 for March. When values are positive like you see for Dec, Jan, and Feb, that means that thereâs something wrong. I probably miscategorized the money I was paid back, I need to change the date of some transactions, or something else. Either way, because youâre tracking both sides of each split expense, you go back and double-check your work and can accurately make sure youâre paid back.
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Thanks for this explanation @richardpeng. Great workflow! 
One thing to note is that youâre using the Tiller Budget and most folks who are new to Tiller start out in the Foundation template so they wonât see that net transfers at the top of their monthly budget dashboard.
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Assuming that you only want to track your personal spending and that you put all joint expenses on that one card, I would add an additional column for expense totals from which all other parts of you sheet pull from. I would make it so that it pulls 50% of expenses on the joint credit card and 100% of all other expenses. Something like: =if(CardNameCell = âName of Cardâ, AmountCell *.5, AmountCell).
I personally have separate tracking sheets for both personal and joint expenses. For that I have a separate âTiller Feedâ sheet where all transactions are loaded. I split them between joint and personal expenses on this sheet and then use importrange to move the expenses to separate joint and personal tracking sheets. Note that we use lots of different credit cards to take advantage of travel hacking opportunities. If we always used the same card for specific expenses, we would use a simpler solution. Hope this is helpful.
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Thanks @car32michael and @richardpeng for your suggestions! I feel like there is a simpler solution available, but I am just not familiar enough to know how to set it up. I am leaning toward manually changing the amount of all of these transactions to 50%, because I donât worry about being reimbursed - we split the full balance at the end of every month. I just need to figure out what to do with the credit card payment for the other 50% nowâŚbut it wonât affect my budget this way, which is good!
Iâm having the same problem but the answers are beyond me! So. I pay a certain amount each month into a joint checking account from my personal checking account and my partner (not on Tiller) pays the same amount from his bank into the joint checking account. We also have a joint credit card that gets automatically paid from the joint checking account each month. How do I notate each of these accounts so I donât get debited or credited double? Or half? Or ⌠Iâm obviously confused. Iâm using the foundations template.
Thanks for any help you can give me but please make it understandable by a true newbie.
Thanks
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Skip to second paragraph for my suggestion, but to get into the details: I have a very simplistic approach to budgeting, essentially I have 2 categories for budgeting, Fixed Expenses and Flex Spending. Fixed are things like mortgage, utilities, streaming services, anything I know the cost is, or can assume the worst case scenario for, and flex is everything else.
My solution to splitting a specific card with my partner is having an addition column on my transaction sheet called âBudget Categoryâ which has three options: Fixed Expense; Flex Spending; Split; Ignore. The split category tells my SUMIF calculations to add only half the expense to my flex budget. Ignore is mostly just for credit card payments, account transfers, etc. Additionally, you could create a âTagsâ column in your transactions and label them as split.
Your best bet is likely going to be @car32michael 's solution. Create a column either using fill down formulas or an arrayformula to look at the account name and divide by 2 or just pull the original amount. Then only use that column for budgeting.
Hope this helps! From my experience the only thing that will work for you will be coming up with your own solutions with ideas from others as the basis. So I hope this points you in the right direction!
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Thanks for the input @car32michael and @coreywillwhat!
In your first suggestion, @car32michael (adding a column that pulls 50% on the join credit card and 100% of all other expenses), how will that affect the rest of my Tiller sheet? I am new to this, but I am thinking how can I tell the other sheets to pull the amounts from the new column instead of the original?
@oliviap what Tiller sheet are you using? The answer is different for specific situations.
The beauty of Tiller is the amount of customization that it allows. To access that customization it is helpful to have a baseline level of Sheets knowledge. Iâd recommend checking out Tillerâs Resources for learning Google Sheets to learn some basics. Once you have Google Sheets skills, Tiller becomes super powerful and fun 
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@betty.tuller, I have a couple of clarifying questions:
- Which of the following accounts are connected to Tiller:
-your joint checking account
-your personal checking account
-your partnerâs joint checking account
-your partnerâs personal checking account
-your joint credit card - Do you have any joint expenses that are paid with something other than the joint credit card?
Definitely check out the Tiller Resource in the comment above for learning the basics of Google Sheets.
@car32michael Iâm using the Foundation Template. Thanks, I will check that out!
@oliviap I made an Example Foundation Sheet for you to look at. My changes are in yellow. Youâll note the new Column F in the Transactions tab and the edit to cell J27 in the Monthly Budget tab.
I started to look into the Yearly Budget tab, but it got late and I was unable to update it to reflect the Personal Amount instead of Amount. Perhaps someone who uses the Foundation Template as their main sheet will be able to point you in the right direction. @heather, any thoughts on updating the Yearly Budget formulas to reflect Personal Amounts in this scenario?
Hope this is helpful.
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thank you @car32michael for this ! @heather Iâde love your perspective on Carâs question above! Iâd like to implement this workflow
@nataliapinzon, we donât have any plans to incorporate these changes into the Foundation template, but if this approach makes sense and works for you feel free to tinker and add it to your own sheet and share in Show & Tell
Thanks @car32michael! This is a huge help for the Monthly Budget Tab.
Iâm trying to implement in the Yearly Budget tab as well, but am getting a bit stuck. Does anyone have any pointers on where to make an attempt here?
Iâm not sure I understand the breadth of the changes, @jperaino, but if you want to point the Yearly Budget to an alternate amount column in the Transactions sheet, you can make that change in cell AO4.
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Looks like that did the trick! Thanks, @randy !
Cool. Glad to hear it, @jperaino.
Hi there. I Am using Car32michaelâs example sheet, and editing cell A04 on the Yearly Budget doesnât do anything.
I want to have a yearly budget based off the âPersonal Amountâ from the Transactions. So in this example the Restaurant actual for May 2020 should be $50. How do I adjust the sheet to do this?
@coawarren, welcome!
Iâm not sure how you might adjust that sheet. @car32michael any thoughts here?