AI for personal finance starts with a spreadsheet you own + introducing Tiller's Claude Connector

News from Tiller
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Every finance app is racing to bolt an AI chatbot onto your accounts. Tiller is not. Instead, we’re focusing on our core strength, which is keeping your financial activity updated and organized in a spreadsheet you own.

Here’s the thing about a spreadsheet: the source stays visible. If AI gives you an answer that seems off, you can verify it directly in your spreadsheet. From people using AI finance tools, we’re hearing that their biggest frustration is knowing whether the data behind it is even accurate. Is my bank still connected? Did that transaction actually come in? Is this total missing something? With Tiller, there’s no guesswork, you can simply open your sheet and verify it.

Your spreadsheet is your source of financial truth. AI helps you interpret and understand it. AI models change. Your spreadsheet remains yours. Your financial history doesn’t live inside someone else’s app or AI so you’re not boxed in.

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This is also why we don’t think there’s one “right” way to use AI with Tiller. It’s another layer of flexibility allowing you to use your preferred AI tool:

  • Google Sheets? Gemini is available right inside your sheet.
  • Excel? Copilot and Claude are available inside your workbook.
  • Prefer Claude or ChatGPT on their own? Both can connect to your Tiller spreadsheet on Google Drive, OneDrive, or in your file system.

Want something built specifically for your Tiller spreadsheet?

The new Tiller Claude Connector, powered by our beta MCP server, connects Claude directly to your Tiller spreadsheet. Ask about your spending, get help categorizing transactions, and analyze your financial data within Claude. You can also connect this beta MCP to most other AI tools.

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The connector works with your spreadsheet, not a separate Tiller database. It reads your data only when you ask it. It requests confirmation before it writes. Tiller doesn’t see your conversations or store the spreadsheet data it reads. Your data is not being used to train any model. Here’s how to connect it if you want to try it.

We’ll keep building on this. If you’re experimenting with any of these tools and have thoughts, we want to hear them. Drop a note here, message beta@tiller.com or post in our new AI Workflows community category.

It’s a space to share how you’re using the Claude Connector, or any other AI tool against your Tiller data, or a spreadsheet in general. One workflow that I’ve been using that I’m really excited about is this Monthly Financial Dashboard where Claude summarizes what happened in my Tiller sheet each month. Check out the full post here.

Heather & the Tiller team

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Any plans to explore an integration with the upcoming Siri AI/personal context? TBH this is the only AI I would trust with my 10+ years of personal finance data, as it either runs on-device or in private cloud compute. Apple has a reputation for not selling my data, which is more than I can say for the other vendors.

The dev cost would be higher, as I believe this requires an actual iOS app to share data with on-device indexing. But this functionality would add ENORMOUS value to my Tiller subscription.

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Hi there,

How is this any different to giving Claude access to Google Drive (and my Tiller sheet). I have already done this and have Claude managing my transactions and reconciling my end of month payments.

Regards,
Robin.

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Great question! The Tiller Claude Connector can write back to your Tiller spreadsheet (categories only for now) where as the Google Drive connector for Claude cannot. We hope to offer some additional editing capabilities in coming releases like AutoCat rules, tags, notes, and much more.

The connector also has awareness of when a fill is running and will only write to the sheet when it’s safe, which helps prevent collisions of multiple edits happening at the same time that could cause data corruptions.

Lastly, it has more context about the “shape” of a Tiller spreadsheet and it’s structure.

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No plans for this just yet @taylorvance but a good thing to keep an eye on.

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Using the Claude Chrome plug in, it can and does write to the sheet for me, it analyses and recommends new categories, adds sheets for analysis and runs autocat.

sharing the context of the sheet would be helpful though. It could be added as a skill. That would reduce context size (and token usage/cost).

Regards,

Robin

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@rwalkerphl thanks for sharing that the Claude Chrome plugin can do the writes. I have seen that it is slow (so token use can be a factor there, but yes maybe a skill speeds it up). However, it doesn’t address the fill conflict behavior. If the Chrome extension starts writing while a fill is happening, this can cause data corruption in your sheet.

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That’s a problem to solve, and can be added into the context/skill. It could also be managed through scheduling. I have not encountered that problem as yet.

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Any chance this is this available to homegrown tools? I’ve got a standalone server that also updates my spreadsheet & have been bitten by concurrent conflicting updates a couple times.

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Claude MCP connection - Brilliant. I was already using my tiller data with Claude by exporting CSV. This is so much easier. Thank you!

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It could in the future, yes. But not something we’ve got built or in progress at this time.

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Can you also enable querying balances? Currently, it’s limited to transactions it seems.

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Oh my goodness, you guys are great! I actually understand your updates, and they are concise and truly usable.
Thank you so much.
Karen

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sounds great but why does it only work on google sheets - I use excel and Claude can’t access those files unless I download them to Claude

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Thanks for the suggestions @FrankF it is on a list of improvements that hopefully we’ll prioritize soon.

Thanks for the feedback @karen.cadorette, and welcome to the Tiller Community :waving_hand:

@pkieran2008 you’re right the MCP does only work with Google Sheets right now. However, you can use Claude for Excel right in your workbook to get a similar analysis/experience. You’re not limited to using Tiller’s MCP to analyze your financial data from Tiller.

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Hi Heather,

I just wanted to let you know that I truly enjoy reading the updates you provide. I really like the way you provide and explain the context of the newest Tiller concepts. Keep doing what you are doing.

Koshan

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I use Excel for Tiller transactions and interact with ChatGPT for analysis. Rather than provide actual data, I provide the column headings only to ChatGPT. I query for a formula to review data, generate charts, etc. I can further discuss and clarify options to get exactly the format I want. I may eventually provide the actual data, but in the interim this serves as a great learning tool.

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Tiller Claude Connector is excellent! Well done, thank you!

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