Today we pushed an update to the Tiller Money Feeds add-on that includes the following new features.
Auto Sort Override
Under the Settings section in the add-on sidebar there is now an option to override the auto sorting mechanism for Transactions that’s on by default. When new transactions are added to your Transactions sheet by the Tiller Money Feeds add-on they are added to the bottom and then sorted to the top automatically. The override setting, when it’s turned on, will leave these transactions at the bottom. This is a great feature for folks who want to use Tiller Money with another service like Zapier and/or Airtable where the tool expects the new rows to be added to the bottom and stay at the bottom.
Faster ways to update sheets
If you have the Auto Update feature turned on under the Settings section in Tiller Money Feeds when you click the “launch” option from the add-ons menu in your Google Sheet and then choose Tiller Money Feeds the sheet will automatically start updating after launch.
If you’re already authorized via the add-ons menu (e.g. you’ve recently launched the sidebar) you can click “update sheets” directly from the add-ons menu under Tiller Money Feeds, which will also launch the sidebar.
What do you think?
I’m especially curious about the update sheets auto launching. I didn’t want to force this update sheets on launch feature on everyone, but also didn’t want to add yet another setting to the Settings section so the middle ground was to have it do this when you already have Auto Update turned on.
If you use the Auto Sort Override, let us know how you’re using it in Show & Tell.
I like it, but it needs to be more informative.
i.e. I just launched it and it did auto launch the update, but did it really do anything?
I have 50+ accounts linked, and looking at https://sheets.tillerhq.com/ not a single one of them is current, most not even from today, many several days old, so without context showing how many accounts actually updated and synced and how many failed to sync, it is a false sense and not at all accurate.
Great point, @J_E_F_F. It’s really just intended to remove an extra click for data you know is available. The best workflow is to visit https://sheets.tillerhq.com and make sure things have refreshed, and then when you launch the Feeds add-on (if you have the Auto Update feature turned on) it will pull in everything new.
I agree, it’s not as useful as seeing which accounts have recently refreshed, etc like you can on the Console, and we hope to offer that type of insight in the add-on sidebar in the future, but we’re not quite there yet and it’s a much bigger effort to do that than it was this.
I’m not dingging Tiller because I love this product!, merely identifying a workflow issue, which I am sure you are aware of, but this is the right place to share this.
When you log on to feeds it is supposed to update the accounts. It only updated 2 (as noted on the Balances tab. So then you have to go to the Tiller Site and refresh each missing update there, then go back to the feed and refresh it again and double check the Balances tab to make sure all of the updates show “Today”.
My logic senses that it would be nice to have everything on the same page. In the Tiller Feeds, there is a linked accounts tab, maybe you could merge some features there. Each tick box could have the account name and a last updated date and more importantly at the top have a Manual Update button there, instead of all of this back and forth between pages in the workbook and the Tiller site. I am not certain that Auto Update is a requirement -there is something very satisfying about manually updating and watching the transactions populate, then applying the auto cat or manually entering the descriptions and picking the categories. Hands on is a great way to understand cash flow and managing expenses.
The only time you would need to go to the site would be to add a new account and the credentials, Once.
Hey guys,
Is the old standalone Auto-Cat Add-on going away?
Seems like plugins are being sandboxed, i.e. you won’t be able to use them without a Tiller account?
Hi @Mariusz, it’s not going away, but it’s being repurposed to only be for the envelope budgeting tool. Tiller Money Feeds does require a subscription to Tiller Money, but Tiller Money Labs is free for anyone to use, though it works best with Tiller Money Feeds sheets.
I don’t like the auto-update when opening the feeds add-on. I am often opening it for other options on the menu (like auto-cat) and I have to wait for it to run before I can do anything.
I do like the “update sheets” option in the add-on menu, but it’s only there sometimes, not all the time.
@charlotte, thanks for your feedback here! The reason the “update sheets” is available in the menu sometimes but not others is due to the permissions & authentication that the add-on needs to check each time you’re opening your sheet for the first time in a while. After launching it once the “update sheets” appears.
I do understand that having it update before you can do anything else is a little tedious, especially if you’re trying to get to other functionality. I guess the advantage is that you know for sure you’ve got everything new in the sheet in the instance where a refresh happened since the last time it updated and that data hasn’t been pulled in yet.
Seems I’m not able to use the Auto-Cat Add-on anymore.
It was still working back in June.
So my post abut Auto-Cat being sandboxed was correct and I’m no longer able to use it without subscription?
I know it might be a niche but are there any plans to make access to AutoCat and maybe some other tools a separate subscription tier?
So Tiller but without the transaction pulling?
AutoCat evolved and got smarter.
I just wish there was some clear upfront communication about big changes like this.
My workflow broke again completely because I can no longer use the plugin without subscription.
Which is hard to justify If I won’t use the transaction pulling as:
I have created a solid workflow using python
Tiller still doesn’t support many of the UK and other international banks
I like how you allow users to turn off the auto sort feature, citing examples such as Zappier, which wants to append new transactions to the bottom of the sheet. However, since you recognize the desire for some users to prefer having their transactions sorted in ascending order, I think the batch of new transactions that you post to the bottom of the sheet should also be in ascending order. That way, if Auto Sort is off, the transactions can all still be in ascending order. If Auto Sort is turned on, you’re going to be sorting the whole sheet in descending order anyways.
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