Hello, All:
Great discussion. My two cents:
I’ve been on board Tiller since June 2019. At that time, our household was in the thick of a two-year journey in the wilderness, so to speak, after a house fire in August 2018. During that period, we managed the insurance claim, temporary housing and storage, multiple construction contracts, paying off one mortgage and writing another, moving all our insurance policies, and legal actions resulting from the fire.
I started by backfilling a few years transactions from Mint. With a four-year dataset, I was able to provide chapter-and-verse for every legal, banking, insurance, and mortgage document request during this challenging experience. Almost every dollar we claimed was paid out without contest, due in no small part to the Tiller sheet. I can’t begin to tally the value of having all this data in one place, either in dollars or mental health.
With all our accounts in the Foundation worksheet, we were able to keep all claim-related income and expenses in a Settlement category, and all reconstruction-related purchases and payments in a Renovation category, and get an up-to-the-minute accounting for either, with line-item detail. By Hiding these in the Category sheet, we were able to keep these cash flows off the books of our daily lives, which were dwarfed in dollars by the fire-related stuff.
As others have said, I think the best way to manage credit cards and other payment platforms like Venmo and PayPal is to allocate to your budget only the original transaction, and make all payments to settle these accounts Transfers. Hiding Transfers from budget calculations keeps it clean, while keeping your account balances accurate. I think of transfers as any transaction that does not make you richer or poorer.
In spite of the non-standard nature of my circumstances, I found it easy to build out my budget categories on the fly, adding, or deleting categories and groups, and turning Hiding on or off to meet changing needs or circumstances. The recent Savings budget just looks like another great tool to put in the box.
Back to your original query: the only other sheet I maintain is one for our vacation home in Canada.
We maintain an account in a local bank from which we pay all related expenses, and since it’s all in a different currency anyway, this gives us a very clear picture of where we stand up there. I just added a column that calculates the net value in US dollars as a reality check.
I’ve been using computers to manage personal finances since 1982, and I’ve never had the level of control and insight that I now have by using one spreadsheet in Tiller