We use Tiller the standard way, tracking and categorizing transactions according to a monthly budget. I am not sure if everyone has an Assets and Debts tab, but we use one that we update every month. It calculates gains/losses MoM and a rolling net worth based on actual account balances.
Previously, I would do a year-in-review each January using the Yearly Budget tab. Well that tab tells us that we’re LOSING almost $20K every year. (I embarrassingly accepted this at face value for 4 years lol). As you can imagine this is stressful. It took me 4 years to realize, wait - we’re not $20k poor-er than last year…in fact our “assets and debts” tab shows slight gain in net worth YoY. I tend to trust this tab since it’s data directly from the bank without any sort of manipulation.
So what gives? Has anyone else had this issue? I reached out to the Tiller team and they were helpful to a degree. Here’s what we tried based on their suggestions:
Double check “transfers” categories. This actually got us a little closer to reality on recent years, but wildly screwed with earlier years…I take this a mark of progress.
Use the Bank Statement Reconciliation Sheet. I don’t think it exists in the community anymore…I can’t find it.
Anyway, sorry if this should be closed. Should I just start my budget over?
I can’t speak to the customized sheet you’ve built, but I can share more context about the Yearly Budget and how it works to hopefully help you figure out the discrepancy. The team was definitely on the right track.
The Yearly Budget sheet shows budget, actual, and available both for the 12 month period you have selected (defaulting to the month/year that’s set in the Categories sheet column E).
If you’re $20k Loss is reflected in the ACTUAL CASHFLOW cell for the entire year columns A - D then this is based on categorized transaction data for that period
If the loss is based on BUDGETED CASHFLOW cell this is based on the budget targets you set on the Categories sheet.
The Yearly Budget does not reflect any amounts associated with categories using the Transfer type (as noted by the team) on the Categories sheet OR categories marked as Hide on the Categories sheet.
I suspect that you have some items marked as “hide” or set as “transfers” that are affecting the actual cashflow value (assuming that’s the number you’re talking about).
The other possible cause of the discrepancy is the date range (does it match your other sheet’s range?).
Last, if you made edits to the Yearly Budget at some point that have modified the calculations you might consider restoring both your Monthly Budget then your Yearly Budget sheet using the Tiller Money Feeds add-on to make sure that it’s calculating everything as intended. The Monthly Budget restore is necessary because the Yearly Budget is re-using formulas/calcs in the hidden area of the Monthly Budget sheet.
I would leverage the Monthly Budget tab and look your top six graphs at the top and see if any of those from January to December look grossly off. If it does, scroll down and see what category is way off, and take it from there.
I would look at the Categories Tab and absolutely make sure that every category is set up right as Income, Expense or Transfer.
If you still come up empty handed, I would go to the Transactions tab, and Filter by Category, and look at each transaction. From experience, I find looking at things all back to back in a category helps you find the mistake that was made. I haven’t had to do that since using Tiller, but I’ve multiple times over the years have had to crawl through my spreadsheets looking for something that was a positive that’s negative, something that was categorized totally wrong, something that should have been a transfer was actually a credit/debit, or some other mistake.
Unfortunately they did not solve the issue.
Im still tracking +/- $1000.00 within my actual account information, but from 01/01/24-06/01/24 we are somehow -$5000.00 off.
Still investigating slowly, when I have time to do so, may just restart my budget sheet…
You can also try checking if you’ve double tracked anything by sorting the Transactions sheet by the Date column then filtering by Category column and going through your data in chunks.
One mistake I’ve made in my sheets before is double counting money transfers or payments since the transaction can appear as both a positive and a negative in your sheet if you are tracking every account associated with the transfer(s)
