Using tiller for Home Construction/Remodel project spreadsheet

[jmriggio]

Looking for a template. Any advice appreciated.

[jono]

Hi @jmriggio,
I would recommend you create Categories for each type of expenses you want to track separately. Then, put all the Categories into the same Category Group: Home Remodel or Home Construction.

Then, there are various existing Tiller templates that will let you analyze your project expenses.

Here’s how you can create a Monthly Spending Pivot report by Group:

Create a Monthly Spending Pivot by Group | Tiller Help Center

You can also use the Category Rollup Report to see your detailed expenses by Category:

Docs: Category Rollup Report

Use our two category rollup reports to get a detailed, transaction-by-transaction view of your finances for a selected time period organized by type, group, and category— available in two report types: Category Rollup - use for line-item detail grouped by category across a specified period Budget Period Rollup - use for reporting against a Tiller-Money budget at the end of a month Category Rollup and Budget Period Rollup reports present static views of your data. If you make changes to th…

Jon

[roleary]

@jmriggio what did you end up doing here? The suggestion from @jono seems like the obvious answer, but has some negative side effects (primarily the categories never go away even though the project ends – only really matters when classifying transaction, but I still imagine it might be annoying).

[randy]

You are correct that the level of detail creates some long-term baggage, @roleary, but the (relatively) new rename & merge category workflows in the Tiller Money Labs add-on can help consolidate detailed expenses into a broader, long-term category like Home.

[antbw72]

Hi Tiller team. @jono Your response about monthly spending pivot by group for analyzing the expenses but is there a way to incorporate budget to this? Seeing what is budgeted against actual expenses? Thanks!

@jmriggio Curious what you ended up doing for this construction project of yours?

[jono]

Hi @antbw72 ,
I can see how adding the budget data to this might be useful. I don’t think there is a simple way to modify the monthly spending pivot by group to include the budget numbers. Budget data is handled in different sheets from the Transactions sheet.

A sheet using custom formulas would certainly be able to show this, but it is a bit more complicated to do than I can answer as a comment here. One approach would be to create a new sheet showing a row for each: Group, Category, Month/Year, Actual, and Budget. From that sheet, you could make a pivot table for the info you are looking for.

There might be some other existing Tiller Budget sheet solutions as well, so I’d look at the Tiller Community Solutions plug-in.

Jon