Tiller Migration and Start Up, Some Questions

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1

Populating new Tiller sheet from YNAB transactions. It’s going well but some questions:

  1. In Tiller, how do I categorize starting balances of my checking, savings and credit cards? YNAB called the payee: Starting Balance and the category: Category not needed but that migrated over to Tiller as “Ready to Assign” for both checking and card accounts. I’m kind of confused on what to do with them.

  2. When I have everything cleaned up and making sense, I’m going to want to connect Tiller to my accounts. Will this overwrite or duplicate all the data I imported from YNAB? I’d like to think the work I’m doing now won’t get mashed by connecting to my banks.

  3. I’m going to hold off on adding my retirement and investment accounts. Also, I’m treating my auto loan and my last credit card balance as expenses. All other credit cards are treated as transfer accounts. I’m only doing this because I’m not sure I can understand the complexities at this point and it kind of makes sense in my mind. I think I’m just looking for someone to say that this is a valid approach when starting out.

  4. Final question (for now). YNAB is envelope budgeting and it is pretty easy to find material to read or watch about this budgeting method. I’m not sure what budgeting method Tiller implements or where I could go to learn the basics. I’ve been through the Tiller videos and mostly feel that it is a money tracker than a budgeting tool. Makes me think I’m missing something. Any suggestions for reading material (blog, vlog, books) that can talk about the various worflows for budgeting that Tiller supports?

2

Couldn’t wait. Had to try. I imported one account and it simply ignored what was already there. So it is all duplicates for the period Tiller downloaded. I’m a little disappointed with that. A lot of work to do to try and remove the dupes.

3

I don’t have any experience with YNAB - I was a former Quicken user.

This was posted a few days ago and may help you get started with Tiller: Introducing the Tiller Video Tour Series

Also, if you use the Search feature in the upper right corner of this community, it will help you find other threads that you may find useful. There is an Envelope Budget tool in the Tiller Community add-ons, but I do not use it. Hopefully someone who does will see this and give you some more getting started assistance.

4

I would first import all your accounts the ‘TIller way’ in a fresh Foundation Template. Then pick a cutoff date where you know everything is up to date in your YNAB data. Delete everything older than that date from the Tilller data, and anything newer than that date from YNAB data. Then copy the YNAB data to the Foundation template, and you should be good moving forward, it will only import new transactions.