New to the community. Like what I see so far and looks like a great tool. Love the flexibility and creativity of the community.
This seems like a great platform for tracking monthly credit card credits (think Amex Gold $10/month dining credit, Amex Platinum $20/month digital entertainment credit etc. Would be great to have a sheet where you could list credits, by account and then pull data from the transaction list for each month to see if you have met your credit to not, perhaps even toggle a checkbox or give you a total of credits received vs available. Think of it like a credit budget. Some of these credits are monthly, others semiannual (Amex platinum Saks credit, Hilton Waldorf/Conrad resort credit), etc.
Has anyone. given this any. thought? These are otherwise a bit of a pain to track manually and it just seems this could b the perfect place to do it.
Hi @jamie1 not sure I understand what you mean by “met your credit”. Can you please clarify? In the meantime does this solution address some of what you’re describing?
If the raw description of the credit as it comes in from the feed will tell you the type of credit it is, then with Autocat, you could either give those transactions their own Category and/or add a tag. You could then use your budget to track the category of the “Tags Report” to track the tag. If the description coming in is vague, you manually change the category or add a tag.
I don’t think my Scheduled Transactions sheet is what @jamie1 is looking for. I would start by creating a pivot table that sums transactions in specific categories by account. One of the challenges would be ensuring that the categorization done in Tiller (whether manually or by Autocat) matches the credit card companies’ categorization, since Tiller doesn’t import that data.
I haven’t done it in Tiller, but here’s an example of a spreadsheet that I downloaded from a Points and Miles blog for manually tracking these credits (I don’t remember the source, sorry!).
Agree with @rhowell that the referenced scheduled transactions sheet doesn’t address the question. “Met your credit” isn’t entirely clear. What I mean has it been triggered which you would see as a transaction. For example the Amex Platinum Card digital entertainment credit comes through as “Platinum Digital Entertainment Credit”. I guess I could set up a sheet like the one @RachelB referenced (which I believe came from The Points Guy blog a few years ago) match the transactions for the descriptions associated with each credit for each card (for example we should receive two of those Amex credits if we have two separate Platinum cards) and total them up for the month and maybe have some conditional formatting that highlights them green if met and red if not, or maybe simply checkboxes instead of amounts. Not sure exactly the best way to go about this. Also, my forte is Excel, not Google Sheets, and the approaches here seem a bit different. I am running Tiller under Google Sheets however b/c it frankly seems more robust with stronger community support.
If anyone wants to work on this, I would be happy to collaborate! This is one of the more cumbersome aspects of the credit cards that do a lot of couponing and rebating, but it is important to know if you need to move spend to take advantage of them as they can more than set off the coast of many cards.
I entered your initial question into ChatGPT, partly to just learn more about these credit programs, but also to see if it had suggestions for what a template might look like. I posted its response on another discussion about AI use with Tiller. This was its response. Was it on track, or no?
Great idea - It definitely seems like something that should be possible to automate in some fashion but I don’t follow these cards enough to understand exactly how it works. The credit is applied after you spend the given amount? So in that case you could even make a progress bar as to how much you’ve spent which would be a nice quick visual. I agree with @rhowell that matching your categorization to the card company categories would be one of the challenges. I do want to note that you can add a new column in your Transactions sheet with the heading of Category Hint and it should be populated with whatever Yodlee has for the category for that transaction. I don’t have recent experience with it. But if they somehow pass on directly what the credit card company considers as the categorization, that seems like it would really help.
@brettanicus That’s pretty spot on, and I would be interested to hear how the descriptions come through for others, but I imagine that you would get what I get given it is coming directly from the feed.
The majority of cards work something like this: for a given category of spend, they award you a credit per @brettanicus post above. Since each card has multiple credits, it would be great to be able to track all of them a la the image @RachelB shared. All of the credits I know of give you credit ups to the credit amount, so using the example of the digital entertainment credit, if you have say a subscription to a streaming service that charges you $15 you only get $15 of credit, but if you have subscriptions to 2 that both charge $15 you only get the max credit which is $20 in this example. Here is a very rough idea (very inelegant) for what it could look like.
In this example the Card column would match the cards listed on your accounts sheet, the Credit would be whatever the user wants to call the credit, Frequency is monthly, quarterly, semi-Annual and Annual, amount is the amount of the credit in each of those periods, Description would be copied from the description that Yodel pulls down to match it. Current Status would be something like showing you how you are doing for the current month (assume June). Then each month would show how you did and you would also have a running total along the top, and maybe even some metrics.
I’ve got ideas but need someone to help with the code. I think this would be pretty popular!
Good feedback on the ChatGPT response. To actually collaborate on coding a template, I’d choose @KyleT over ChatGPT any day, if he’s interested. He does great work.
