Tracking shared expenses against a single income?

Google Sheets
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I’m curious if anyone else budgets like we do and if so, how you manage it in Tiller.

My goal
I want to see all of my expenses and only half of the amounts of the shared expenses I have with my spouse tracked against only my income.

The details
I track all of my income and expenses in Tiller. My spouse manually inputs only transactions that we share (bills, entertainment, etc.) into Tiller. We split all of our shared expenses 50/50. (He keeps a mental budget for his own expenses and doesn’t feel a need to keep a more formalized one in Tiller. That’s fine—it works for him and he’s working with me to get me what I need for financial peace of mind.)

All of our shared expenses are tagged “split” and then the name of the person being split with. So if I buy groceries, I’ll tag it “split, spousename” to indicate that he owes half of that amount, and vice versa. I have a separate sheet that calculates the totals of what we owe each other each month.

If useful, I also prefer to use the savings/envelope budgeting style.

My problem
Tiller’s default spreadsheets for insights, monthly budgets, and yearly budgets calculate the full amount of our shared transactions, so it constantly looks like I’m overspending. This compounds with the envelope style budgeting so that it looks like we’re constantly in debt and massively overspending in categories where we’re actually quite comfortable.

What I’ve tried
I’ve tried basically duplicating what Tiller does but only taking half the amounts of our shared expenses to get a better idea of where my money is going against my paycheck. I have a bandaid solution working, but it got messy fast, and I’m not necessarily a formula/query guru. I can get by (esp with some assistance from ChatGPT) but…it’s so much extra work. There has to be an easier way.

I’ve thought about modifying Tiller’s template logic, but that would just be wiped out the next time I update the templates.

Does anyone else budget this way? How do you do it in Tiller without duplicating Tiller functionality and sheets? Or having Tiller’s calculations tell you that you’re overspending when you aren’t?

Desperately looking forward to any insights or advice anyone has!

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Hello and welcome. One thing that comes to mind is that you could create multiple categories for split expenses (eg. Abby Groceries and Spouse Groceries, Abby Entertainment and Spouse entertainment, etc.). Let’s say the household budget for grocers is $200. Set each grocery category at $100. If you both spent $100, the rollover at the end of the month would be $0 for each of you and you are all square. If you spent $125 and Spouse spent $75, your rollover would be -$25 and his would be $25. He owes you $25 for Groceries but maybe he spent more for shared Entertainment. You could create a sheet that took those rollovers from across all shared Categories and calculated a total, end of month balance. It would take a little thought on how to treat the values but you could calculate a single value of who spent more, how much, and what is owed to go back into balance. You can’t just add -$25 and $25 because that’s obviously $0 and you don’t want Spouse to skip out on that bill. You would have to use absolute values, but still find a way to keep the running total between individuals. I’m sure there’s a way, you would just have to play with it.

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I wonder if maybe using the splitting tool to split transactions into two, each with different category could help?