A few questions from a prospective small business customer with an unusual business model

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Hi Tiller folks!

My wife and I are co-founders of The Retro Roadshow, a pop-up museum of vintage technology. It’s a lot of fun but also something we take very seriously. We’ve been using Wave to manage our business finances for about a year now, but it’s been a frustrating experience.

Like most business-oriented financial apps, Wave puts a lot of focus on things we don’t need or want, like payroll (we don’t do payroll), managing inventory (we don’t sell physical items), online payment processing and shopping carts (we don’t sell anything online), etc. This didn’t seem like a big deal at first (just ignore those features!) but in practice it’s a constant annoyance to have to work around all of its built-in assumptions about our business.

Ultimately what we really need is a simpler tool that can help us with a few things:

  1. Tracking our business expenses, whether recurring (annual storage locker fees, service subscriptions, insurance, etc.) or one-time (a ‘new’ vintage computer or gaming artifact to showcase in our upcoming events).
  2. Tracking the categories of our expenses, and organizing which account they were paid from
  3. Track due-dates for upcoming bills
  4. Automatically track profit / loss, operating expenses, etc.
  5. Generate or export whatever report(s) required for filing our taxes

Based on the info above, is Tiller the tool for us? It seems really slick and also seems to lack most of the stuff we don’t care about, but I’d love to hear from anyone who uses it for anything remotely comparable to what I’ve described above.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts you might share!

Huxley

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From your description with the tiller foundation and community add-ins, you should be able do what you need. If you search the community for the specific things, you should see community posts that match your need. I don’t use many of those forms for my needs, but I’ve seen topics on several of those.

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the main thing i haven’t seen discussed as much ie a existing template is the above.
I wonder if for your needs quickbook might be a better fit regarding bill tracking? At the end of the day tiller is mainly a spreadsheet software that has automated downloading of transactions.
Thus you can finagle most of what you need based oh what what sheets and excel can do.
But for more native support specifically for 3 and 5 other software might be better.
Especially 5, because it can generate the reports you need for tax filing, but it’s not a whatever report; you’ll need to know what report you’ll need and curate your data and template to generate it.

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@Huxley Welcome to Tiller!

There is a help guide that address using Tiller for a small business. If you haven’t already seen it below is a link to the guide. Specifically, step 6 gets to the small business solutions within Tiller.

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There is this community template, which is supported by the Tiller Community, but you can install it via the Tiller Money Feeds sidebar : Docs: Bill Payment Tracker

We can :100: handle all the other stuff out of the box :slight_smile:

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