Tiller Money Labs Roundup 9/10/20 - Savings Budget

[randy]

Our Tiller Money Labs team is working to keep you efficient, inspired, and enabled with financial templates, tools and workflows. In our Tiller Money Labs Roundups, we keep you updated on our latest features and sheets.

Savings Budget

With your feedback, we are making great strides at improving and hardening the new Savings Budget.

While it is still in a dev-feedback stage, we plan to demonstrate it broadly next week. If you have questions or would like to learn more, don’t miss the Tiller Money Live webinar next Thursday at 10AM PST!

Template Updates

In the past week, we’ve made the following changes to the Savings Budget (Prototype) template

• Moved and consolidated the Adjust ± column to save space and improve UX
• Fixed Available calculation for adjusted income budgets
• Restored budget start date formula preset
• Fixed bug affecting group & type totals when hidden categories are present
• Fixed bug affecting Available calculation for adjusted income budgets
• Updated color scheme

If you have an older version of the template, you can easily update your copy by using the Manage Solutions workflow in the Tiller Money Labs add-on.

Merge Categories Workflow

Based on a suggestion in this community from @aronos, we built out a category-merge workflow.

It is built into the Tiller Money Labs add-on’s Tools / Savings Budget menu.

The Merge Categories workflow performs the following steps:

• Recategorizes all transactions from source to destination category in the Transactions sheet
• Reclassifies all savings/budget modifications in the Budget Journal sheet
• Moves all source budgets into the destination budgets in the Categories sheet
• Deletes the source category row from in the Categories sheet
• Updates AutoCat rules using the source category

Migration Tool

A few weeks ago, we debuted a semi-automated migration workflow for users in using the Envelope Budget (via Tiller Add-on). This week we made a few improvements based on feedback in this community from user @aronos:

• Though the Savings Budget (Prototype) doesn’t include the rollover-to concept, the migration tool can now replicate historic rollover-to shifts in your new budget by modeling them in the Budget Journal sheet
• Fixed a bug that rendered Categories-sheet budgets in reverse-chronological order

Cheers!

[matta]

Hey Randy, I noticed that the Merge Categories Workflow did not update the Category column in my AutoCat sheet (if the deleted category was present there).

[randy]

Good catch, @matta. I’ve added this to my list.

[randy]

The Tiller Money Labs add-on now updates AutoCat rules on a Merge Categories operation.
Thanks for the suggestion, @matta.

[maktampa]

For people who have been using the foundations template budget for some time (7 months for me), and starting the savings budget now, is there a way to start new with the savings budget as of the current month? Otherwise, I have to go back to prior months and adjust each category month by month and move forward. Any suggestions here?

Also, I have a few categories that show up twice in the savings budget, but not on my monthly budget. In all cases one category is capitalized and the other is not, but the dollar amounts appear to be duplicated. (example: Golf and golf). This is not the case in my monthly budget.
|Golf|$58.97|$280.00|$664.99|
|—|---|—|---|
|golf|$58.97|$280.00|$664.99|

[randy]

Hey @maktampa! Welcome to the community.

If you haven’t already found it, there is an easy way to start from the current month using the Savings Budget. If you go into the hidden area by unhiding the columns to the right of column H, you will see a Starting Period setting in cell M2. Just go ahead and set that to the month you’d like to start tracking savings accruals from.

Regarding the duplicate categories, can you tell me more about what is going on in the spreadsheet. Are there duplicated category names in the Categories sheet? Do you have data validation turned on in the Categories column in the Transactions sheet (i.e. to force matching capitalization)? Do any rows in the Transactions sheet use different category capitalization than the Categories sheet?

Based on how the sheet is built, I can see how it would display duplicates where the Monthly Budget would not… but I don’t understand what would be the source of the alternate capitalization.

Best,
Randy

P.S. I’m really sorry I lost track of this thread. I’m doing my best to catch up on posts like yours now. Thanks for your patience. I hope I’m not too late on this.

[maktampa]

Hi @randy . Thanks for responding. Now, I am just seeing this for some reason. Anyway, the novice here sees that in M2 the formula is =BC4. Is this a special formula that =1/1/2020? I can’t enter the date that I want which now is 1/1/2021 now. It doesn’t accept that. Is there a code that= 1/1/2021?

[randy]

Good question, @maktampa.

The cell M2 is intended as a hidden space to override your budget start month. It autopopulates from the earliest budget in your Categories sheet which a formula in cell BC4 determines. You can type over it with a different date, just be sure not to put an equals sign before it. Just enter 1/1/2021.

Good luck.