Coming from YNAB, you only needed one number to reconcile an account, your current balance. You login to your account manually, check the balance, and tell YNAB the current balance. If it matches the transactions, YNAB puts a lock on those transactions to confirm they’ve been reconciled.
I saw a duplicate transaction come in to my tiller spreadsheet today, so I did some research on what the reconciliation process looks like with tiller, in case I missed any other import issues. I was brought to this page.
It requires:
- Waiting until the end of the month.
- Logging into each account and opening the latest statement.
- Inputting 3 numbers from the statement for each account: Starting balance, net purchases, and net withdrawals.
- Going to the Transactions tab in Tiller, and manually marking each transaction, from each account, during the same time period of the statement.
Only then will I be informed if my transactions are off. And if so, I have to go through an entire month’s worth of data to find the error.
Why is this necessary? All YNAB needs is the current balance. Tiller already has the current balance on the Balances sheet, which is completely separate from the transactions sheet. If you edit a transaction, the balance on the Balances sheet for that account does not change.
In short, all the data is there already. Why can’t Tiller reconcile for me? Why can’t Tiller auto-check if the transactions match the balance, and inform me if they diverge?
Am I missing something? Does this sheet already exist?
, @srtiller!
Thanks for sharing feedback about this workflow with us. I can totally see why coming from YNAB the process in our system seems a little more clumsy.
The data feed to Transacitons is a separate feed than the one to Balance History. As you’ve realized, those are not tied together at all.
The day you connect an account to Tiller Money we pull in the Balance for each account for that day, but we can pull in 90 days of historical transaction data so it’s very challenging to match the current balance to the amount the transactions add up to because of that historical data and the way the dates work (they’re cleared/posted dates) and be confident that is truly the balance.
Anyhow, perhaps some savvy person will build a workflow that’s a little more streamlined and share it in Show & Tell. You can also add a feature request for our team to consider.
Thanks for joining the community!
There’s an easy solution to that. Simply do the calculations moving forward only.
For example, yesterday Tiller said my balance was $1000, today Tiller says my balance is $900. If today’s transactions for that account total up to $200, something’s wrong.
I’ll add a feature request.
Feature request is here, in case anyone finds this:
community[dot]tillerhq[dot]com/t/auto-reconcilie-accounts/5054
I would suggest the following to get started -
When an account is added, tiller gets the current balance and up to 90 days of transactions. From this back calculate the initial balance and record this. Allow the user to override this if they want to manually add more transactions.
Now that the initial balance is set, tiller should be able to compute the expected current balance using the initial balance and all transactions in that account. Visually display the accounts for which the computed balance differs from the downloaded balance.
As the original poster expects - tiller can get fancy and automatically mark transactions as ‘reconciled’ if the balances match