We’re so glad you’re here. This community is a place for inspiration and collaboration. Here you’ll learn how best to leverage Tiller Money powered spreadsheets, what’s possible with Tiller Money, and discover awesome tools and workflows other community members have built on our platform.
At the core of the work we do at Tiller Money is our mission to empower people with their financial data in a reliable, flexible, and automated way so they can feel at ease about their money and get back to everything else in life that’s more important.
Money matters because life matters more.
What’s your story?
Everyone’s money story is different. Whether you’re living paycheck to paycheck, a first time parent, a billionaire, or right out of college you are welcome here.
Through all our research and talking with thousands of customers we’re sure: spreadsheets are the best way to be in tune with your money no matter where you’re coming from or where you want to go.
To help everyone feel welcome, heard, and a member of this space we recommend pondering these questions and sharing what feels right so others can get to know you around here. Click reply below (sign up with your Google Account in the upper right if you haven’t already to reply). Then dive into our New Member Guide to learn more about how the community works.
Happy tracking!
Heather
Questions to ponder - share what feels right
Where are you from?
What is your industry and profession?
What are your money goals?
Where are you feeling stuck financially?
What is your money story?
What’s your spreadsheet skill level?
How did you hear about Tiller Money?
What were you doing to understand your money before you found Tiller Money?
Are you still using other tools alongside Tiller? If so, which?
What do you hope to gain from using Tiller Money?
What solutions are you excited to try from Tiller Money Labs?
Have you built spreadsheet solutions you’d love to integrate with Tiller Money Feeds?
A note about community safety and privacy
Most of the content on this community is publicly visible and searchable on the internet. As a company we may reference your stories for inspiration about our product roadmap, onboarding, and how to attract the right customers, but we will not share or use any information, quotes, or stories outside our team without your explicit permission.
I’m the Customer Success Lead and Product Owner (plus a few other ) here at Tiller Money. We’re a start up so everyone has a few roles
I am passionate about our product (and our vision for helping people) and use it myself for budgeting and tracking. Before using Tiller Money I didn’t really use anything to track my money.
I’m debt free (paid off my 10K student loan debt in about 4 years) and mostly just try to save or invest as much as I can right now so setting spending targets and trying to stay under them is helpful.
I don’t consider myself to be an advanced spreadsheet nerd, but an intermediate tinkerer. I love spreadsheets.
I live in the mountains in Western North Carolina. I love mountain biking, rock climbing, yoga, and being in nature.
Honestly, I don’t really know what to do with my money or how to invest other than just an IRA.
I had no idea you were in North Carolina. I spent every summer of the 1960’s (until I left for college) in Blowing Rock. I miss nothing about the east coast really, except the North Carolina mountains
I’m Susan Dennis and I’m a cliché. I’m an old retiree who spends hours every day looking and checking and conjuring on my finances. I’m have a lovely nest egg but will die, I’m sure, with a still tight grasp on the fear of becoming a bag lady.
I spent my career tech adjacent. A speech writer for tech executives and then the rest as a web producer (back in the early days when it was dirt simple and everybody thought you a genius if you spoke HTML).
I have used all the apps since way before Microsoft Money up to and including Personal Capital and Mint. I came to Tiller because I wanted to look at, massage, understand my money my way. I’m not a spreadsheet genius but I know the power and I knew if I could get some druid magic to fill up a spreadsheet with my $$ details, then the only limit would be what I could learn. Enter Tiller.
But, another huge factor for me was that ‘learn’ component so before I even signed up, I made sure there was a forum, a community, where I could ask questions and read others’ questions and answers. I have not been disappointed in any of it for one bit. And I’m now quite a bit spreadsheet smarter than I was.
I live in Pioneer Square Seattle - me and my cat (did I mention how much of a cliché I really am??). When I’m not glued to my Tiller spreadsheet, I love swimming, The Mariners, maker stuff (knitting, crocheting, sewing) and thriller novels.
I love the logic, the order, and yet the endless possibility and creativity of spreadsheets. Long before Tiller Money, I used spreadsheets in work, spreadsheets for fun (planning a wedding together, buying a house, tracking finances). Often the simplest spreadsheet can be enlightening. Spreadsheets don’t have to be fancy nor complex to be insightful and powerful.
I’ve also always loved teaching and helping others. Some of this dates back to my early years. One of my jobs as a kid in high school was teaching classes on how to use Quicken. In college I worked at Microsoft on their personal finance software team. Later as an adult I taught kids about finances through Junior Achievement.
Now have an incredibly fortunate job to be able to combine this all into our work here at Tiller Money. Spreadsheets, finance, empowerment, better futures!
I’ve had moments in life where I’ve felt worry free about money. Moments when I’ve lost sleep about money. My hope is that with better tools, we empower each of us to manage our money effectively so we can focus on everything else in life that’s more important.
This community has become such a fun and wonderful place to see that in action. I am eager to read your story - chime in!
I’m Randy! I do most of the development on the Tiller Money Labs add-on, and I help out with the Tiller Money Feeds add-on too.
I had never used Google Sheets when @peter asked me to consult on a few Tiller workflows in May 2016. Four years later, I’m a full convert. I use Google Sheets to track my kids’ homework assignments & allowance, manage a wholesale coffee coop, and design machines with my son.
My wife and I have never been budgeters, but we do diligently categorize & track our spending. (We have migrated 20 years of spending history from several different platforms into our Tiller Money spreadsheet.)
With all the time I spend refining dashboards and workflows for budgeters, I finally decided to try budgeting this year. My wife and I decided to bring in our 15-year-old daughter so she could learn about spreadsheets and money. The experiment has been a success in terms of learning, but not so much in terms of staying on budget. We have a lot to learn and I’m confident this year’s baseline will help.
My hobbies are photography, guitar, building machines, and playing frisbee with the kids.
It’s been wonderful to share this journey with you all in the community.
Hello, Edward here. You might know me from the Tiller Money Memo. I’m fascinated with everyone’s money stories. All are unique, yet all share a few things in common. It’s always amazing (yet understandable) to me that money is such a taboo topic. It’s something almost everyone has to think about, plan for, deal with, yet we rarely talk about it with openness. Family and household finances are also a vast topic. (It’s expensive to raise kids!) As I’ve gotten older, my thoughts about money have shifted from what I need to what my family needs. In my work at Tiller Money, I hope to advance a pragmatic, thoughtful approach to personal finance. And spreadsheets are the pragmatic, thoughtful tool for the job.
I’m Krista! I’m part of the Customer Success team here at Tiller Money.
When I was learning to drive, my grandfather gave me a piece of financial advice that would turn out to be a game changer. No matter what, always keep $20 in your glovebox. The idea stuck with me. You can’t plan for everything, but you can plan to be prepared. And 2020 has surely reinforced that so far.
So while his primary aim was probably just to protect teenage-me in the case of a misplaced wallet or forgetting to fill up my gas tank (yep, and yep ), it also started the shift in my perspective around money.
Fast forward to now and my background is actually more on the financial planning side than the spreadsheet side so I always feel I still have plenty to learn (especially among the Tiller Money team!), despite being a fan and regular user of Google Sheets for so long.
In my spare time I love reading, getting outside, and hanging out with my dog Charlie. Also, I wouldn’t necessarily say that I love home improvement projects, but I have found myself spending a lot of time on them lately!
Hi, I’m Dennis, living in Chicago. I’ve come to Tiller after 20+ years using Quicken. I started tracking my finances at 8 years old, when my mother taught me double entry bookkeeping in a paper ledger. I’ve been balancing my accounts regularly ever since.
I manage software developers for a living, working on a large public facing web site. Spreadsheets have long been in my repertoire of professional tools, although I’ve never been “a spreadsheet developer”. I’ve enjoyed learning several good tricks from digging in to what the Tiller sheets can do. That said, managing my personal finances is something I need to do as a responsible adult, and I want to do it as quickly and efficiently as I can so I can go on and to other things. I’ve really enjoyed the reduction in time spent that Tiller has given me over Quicken.
I don’t expect personal finance management to be a hobby, but I will be popping in and out occasionally to see what’s interesting.
Hi, I am Alex. I live in Texas where I work as a chemical engineer.
I have zero experience with Google Sheets, but have been using Excel my entire life as a way to analyze data and to solve problems. As such I have used spreadsheets for a number of financial activities for my family. For over 20 years I have used Quicken, but have really only used it for net-worth tracking. I was never able get get what I needed out of it for financial planning, budgeting and control. Over the years I turned to creation of my own spreadsheets for those activities.
I generated a full retirement planner/progress tracker that I keep evergreen that includes all aspects of retirement goals and status against plans. A lot of people put thought into how money gets INTO their retirement, but not so much around survivor planning or how to extract money OUT of their accounts to make it last. I filled this gap for our family in case something happens to me by putting together a survivor plan worksheet for my wife that shows how she can order the amount and type of funds extraction (eg: life insurance payout, savings, survivor benefits, soc security, assets sales, etc) all adjusted for inflation to allow for essentially a steady stream of inflation-equivalent income “indefinitely”. The gap between that and what she wants in terms of lifestyle is what she will need to fill through her own income. However, at least it is transparent and she has that knowledge. In addition to this I built an Excel tool for zero-based budgeting for the more immediate term (weekly/monthly/annual) planning.
I found out about Tiller Money when a friend of mine was using one of my spreadsheets and asked me if they could import bank data into it. I did some research and of course found Tiller Money! I had not really needed this to that point as I had integrated Quicken transaction reports as data feeds into my spreadsheet. However, my friend did not have Quicken and I did not want to recommend that if there was an easier way to get data in (avoid a two-hop data feed). The Tiller data feed has been a welcome discovery. We set up a Tiller Money account under my wife’s name (as she manages all of the actual financial accounts for us) in about September last year and I was easily able to integrate the data feed into the one tool my friend needed. I have periodically been reviewing postings in this Tiller community over the past few months. I just set up my own Tiller forum account this week so that I can contribute. I am currently still learning to understand Tiller and how it can fit into my personal plans. As stated before I am an avid Excel user, but not really into Google Sheets. At the moment that is fine because I currently only need the data feed to hook into my custom solutions. However, if more Tiller tools become standard in Excel I am happy to look into those!
Hi everyone! (including @heather ). I’m Aubrey, and live/work in Washington, DC where I’m a fed for a major federal agency, first starting off as a budget analyst working on the ‘formulation’ of multi-hundred million dollar annual operating budgets, and now taking a slight detour working with a program office in the same agency working on a national project. Views expressed are my own.
I’ve got a masters in (i) accounting, (ii) public administration, and am working on a (iii) master of science in finance. I’m of intermediate Excel ability, a complete noob when it comes to Google Spreadsheets, don’t know VBA, but will begin learning Python within one or two years in my academic program. I definitely love and hold dear MS Excel, but the Google Spreadsheets ecosystem (especially with the Tiller community) has won me over for the purposes of tracking my financial data. I’ll be honest: I would absolutely love to return to Excel for tracking my financial data, and look forward to the Tiller community fleshing out some of the spreadsheets on parity with Excel.
I’m in love with all the features that the Tiller community is coming up with, and look forward to contributing as time goes on.
My name is Manny and I live in the Bay Area, California. I’ve always been interested in personal finance and was previously using Mint or spreadsheets when it comes to budgeting.
I love the logic, easy connectivity with my financial institutions and customization that Tiller offers. I use it more for expense tracking than I do hardcore or envelope type budgeting. I’m subscribe to Boglehead type investing philosophy, but very early in my learning.
Welcome @ejisrawi ! I’ve heard of Boglehead investing philosophy, but haven’t studied it much. Feel free to share any helpful Boglehead <> Tiller insights in our Discussions category
And a super late hello and welcome to @Alex.Mtz - have you been able to wire up your retirement planner with Tiller? Are you avid in our Excel product?
Hi I’m Len from Fallbrook, CA.
I’ve been using spreadsheets as far back as Lotus 123. Dating myself! I used Quicken for years but it stopped working well when Intuit sold it off. I was pleased to find MS Money for Excel and bummed to find out that they are dropping the product. Glad that Tiller has stepped up to the plate with a product that seems to be working well. Keep up the good work.
Fallbrook is in north San Diego county. The avocado capital. We have 40+ avocado trees on our property. They keep me busy! I also enjoy woodworking and wood turning. Since Covid, I’ve not been fly fishing much but hope do get back at it, soon.
Glad to hear that you’re enjoying Tiller so far. I’m sure those avocado trees do keep you busy and hope you can get back to fly fishing soon! You’re well versed in spreadsheets, which means you’ll feel right at home with Tiller.
If you ever need help reach out to our support team via the chat window in the lower right corner of the Console at https://sheets.tillerhq.com/auth/login
I’m a teacher (in North Carolina as well!). I used Quicken back in the day and when my wife and I decided to budget things more tightly I decided to try Quicken again. Now I’m looking for something a bit better, and I gravitated towards this because I happen to be a big Google Sheets nerd. So I’m doing the trial run and seeing if this will be my Quicken alternative.
OK, now that I’ve finally tried every financial tracker on the market (it seems like) I’ve finally settled on Tiller! I guess it’s ok to do an introduction now
We are originally from Texas (currently domiciled in Florida, long story). We quit our jobs early (a bit too early) and then traveled a lot. I worked a couple more years to vest in my pension, and as of 2017 we are officially retired. Our careers were in court reporting (wife) and I.T. (me). During my career I spent a lot of time in spreadsheets. Mainly Excel, of course, but started in Lotus 1-2-3 and also had a brief but wonderful time in the early 90’s using Lotus Improv on a NeXT computer. Now I’m all-in on Google Sheets, but use Numbers on my Mac for some things as well.
Wanting to track what we’ve spent, mainly so I don’t look at total year-end balances and say “hey, where did we spend all this money?” This is a problem because here in Mexico it is a very cash-focused society. I am going to track the cash in detail for a few months to establish a baseline, but after that will probably just estimate monthly totals by category. I am most definitely not going to track details like $0.50 for every time I hop on a local bus!
Looking forward to trying out the following templates soon:
You’ll love this. I started my career as an assistant in the Office of the Attorney General in FL. At the time (2013) their entire system was based around Lotus Notes. I just spoke with a friend who still works there, they contracted with a private entity to migrate away from Lotus Notes and ended up having to sue the entity because they made promises they couldn’t deliver on. So their system is still entirely built on Lotus Notes 10 years later.
I’m a born-in-Brooklyn New Yorker, and a retired CFP.
My goal in trying Tiller is simply to keep track of my finances and be able to assemble income and expenses for my annual tax reporting. I used Quicken for many years, but about two years ago it became an unfixable disaster. Searching for a replacement, I found Tiller, and I can see how perfecly would meet my needs, but I’m having difficulty with navigating the program.
Welcome!
) here at Tiller Money. We’re a start up so everyone has a few roles 
), it also started the shift in my perspective around money.
- surprised it was still available.