Transaction Splitter - Adjust values or rejoin to start over?

Hi Folks,

I’m new the tiller community and trying to learn as much as I can during the trial period. Please forgive me if this is obvious, I couldn’t find an answer.

I’ve been exploring the transaction splitter and am wondering if a split action is reversible in any manner other than manually adjusting one of the split transactions and deleting the remaining transactions created by the split tool.

It would be nice to be able to adjust the values and change the number of splits retroactively if I’ve made a mistake or want to split out additional items (or remove existing ones) without losing track of the total mathematical relationship of the transactions. Costco, for example is the worst as I will usually categorize it as groceries and/or furnishings, but later will realize we purchased something as a gift for somebody.

If there isn’t a way to do this currently, this may just be a feature request. It would be nice if the splitting tool could recognize its own meta data (split note) and combine it with the transaction ID to identify all of the other already split transactions and repopulate the split window with the existing numbers. (Does that make sense?)

If that’s too tricky, another way might be to automatically create an extra positive entry matching the original transaction total value (rather than delete the original transaction) for a zero sum. (Similar to the way the super awesome Amazon Line Item tool works.) This would at least allow the original transaction to remain untouched so that there is both a clearer paper trail and an easier way to revert back to the single transaction for starting over.

Thanks for any advice,

Michael

@michael20

Thoughts:

  1. The splitter tool does not work in reverse.
  2. Manually fix.
  3. Go back to a prior version of your sheet to get to the pre-split version then do your new split.
  4. Delete all parts of the split transaction. If this a recent transaction, the feed might bring in the original transaction again if it sees that it is now missing. Proceed with caution on this one but I seem to recall having experienced this myself.

Blake

Thanks Blake,

That’s about what I suspected. I appreciate the confirmation and approach.

I tried deleting both transactions of a recent test split. I then chose to ‘update sheet’ from the tiller feed. It seems that the transaction did not get pulled in again. (Although I’m not sure I understand how the Tiller feed tracks whether a transaction is downloaded other than the transaction ID.)

I’ll stick with manually fixing and referencing the note section of one of the splits for the original total for now.

M

Hi @michael20,

Once it’s added to the sheet it wouldn’t get pulled back in. We use a watermark mechanism in the background to track what transactions were added, not the Transaction ID.

Let me know if you need more help!

Heather

Hi @heather,

Ahh… I see. Just to understand fully, is this something on the server side or something an end user could possibly control with a little digging? Or another way of asking, if I decided I did want to re-pull transactions within the last month, would I effectively need to start a new linked sheet?

M

@michael20, it’s sheet specific, so if you wanted those transactions you could link a new sheet and it would pull it back into the new sheet. It’s still on the server, but the add-on sees it as already having been filled.

@heather ,

Is your answer the same regarding balances?

Blake

@michael20

Here is something that I just read. It is another option.

Blake

Re-added a Previously Removed Account

If you’ve removed an account from the Account Summary of your Tiller Console and then re-add the account and link it to a sheet to which it was previously linked you’ll see duplicate transactions in that sheet from that account.

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Based on this and the previous details, I suspect my best approach to re-pulling transactions lost to a split would be.

  1. Filtering by transaction ID. Deleting all but one transaction. Manually updating the amount of the last transaction by checking the notes field for the original value. (Which means I should maintain a notes field.)

  2. If for some reason I’ve lost the original value or details I need, but I’m within the window of transactions still cached by the tiller feed, create a new sheet linked to the account and download the transactions again… then copy over the transaction in question.

Although I appreciate understanding the details of when the Tiller feed will allow new transactions to download, I probably wouldn’t delete and read-add an account for fear of then having to hunt down more duplicates… especially if I’m maintaining more than one sheet.

M

First post here, splitting transactions being a top feature for day to day use that I’d need.

Is the ability to run the splitter tool in reverse on the roadmap? Since transaction data is maintained (including ID i think) as it splits, it seems it would be “easy” to extend the functionality to “re-open” a split transaction set (IE if you click on a row that has already been split, running the tool re-opens the side-bar split items and allows you to modify or back-out). This may have been discussed elsewhere already but this was what came up in my search. Would be a big plus for maintaining data integrity in the sheet.

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Check out how Mint does it as they provide lots of flexibility and it’s intuitive.

:wave: @speez !

I’d recommend posting this as a Feature Request - it’s a great idea!

If you have a “Note” column in your Transactions sheet when you use the Split tool in the Labs add-on it will record a note about the original split so you could use that to manually piece it back together.

Because this thread pre-dates the transition from community-supported transaction splitter to Tiller-supported transaction splitter, I have created a Feature Request

I think should address the original request from @michael20 at the beginning of 2020 (before most people had even heard of COVID).

It would be nice if the splitting tool could recognize its own meta data …

@speez, @michael20,

If it is still important for you to adjust/update/restart transaction splits, please up-vote this Feature Request so that it will bubble up so that @heather can present it to the development team: