This budget, plan community solution template is is good. It allows me to really understand how I should get this cleaned up and published appropriately. Thank you, Clint. I’m gonna review this budget plan in detail.
Everyone should be on the “Foundation Template”, but when they started helps determine what columns they have (some have been added over time). Other columns are optional, or you can add your own, and you can determine the order you want them in. Here’s more info about the official columns: Transactions Sheet Columns | Tiller Help Center
You can see what the latest version looks like by going to the console (tiller.com) and adding a new spreadsheet. I have a bit over 16,000 rows in mine, this will fluxuate wildly depending on the person and how they track things. I use Google Sheets primarily and dabble with Excel. So far my AI experience is primarily with doing code in VS Code (usually with Claude) and with either Gemini at home or CoPilot at work. I generally just ask questions, haven’t gotten into prompts and such yet. Still on the edge on whether I should use it with live financial data.
Hi Blaine - I primarily use Excel but at any time could flip over to Sheets. The Tiller Foundation Template is just the default transaction/categories/budget sheet you get when you sign up. Like @jpfieber said you can get a copy when you create spreadsheet from the console. I primarily use Gemini Pro for my AI questions. But I would imagine that any prompt you build would work in any AI chat window. Right? I have 930 rows of transactions (about a half a year’s worth). I haven’t categorized all of my transactions yet because my SQL database does it automatically for me. But that could be remedied because it autoreplies after a table load with two csv files categories.csv and transactions.csv. The database does not work well with blank categories so I use category hints to fill in the blanks. The sheet does not get touched unless you want it to by copying and pasting the categories. I don’t mind financial sharing data with Gemini. Although not a fiduciary Google has not overreached into the space like OpenAI.
That’s good news, and helpful context.
I’ve been using Tiller for about three years, and I don’t think I’ve changed much in the spreadsheet itself other than unhiding a few tabs. I’ll take a look at the official Foundation Template column list and compare it against mine to confirm whether anything important has changed.
My sheet has about 7,000 transaction rows, which is one of my concerns with this workflow. Claude may need to export or create a working copy of the Transactions table in order to analyze it, so I want to better understand where the practical limits are and what the safest process should be.
I haven’t used VS Code in a long time. I’ve used Gemini some, and not much Copilot. Lately I’ve been focused mostly on ChatGPT and Claude, and I’m working on ways to keep project information synchronized between them. I often use one to help validate or challenge the other.
Thanks for pointing me to the official column documentation. I’ll review that and see whether there are any issues with my current sheet or with changes in the 2026 version. Blaine
The Transactions sheet column information is extremely helpful and confirms that the prompt should be on the right track for the standard Foundation Template.
If someone has added unique columns or customized their sheet structure, the prompt may need some adjustment, but that seems manageable.
As I continue testing this and prepare to have others try it, I’d appreciate your guidance on the proper process for publishing something like this. Beyond simply posting it on the message board, is there a preferred methodology or review process?
I noticed that your budget sheet is already published in a very structured way, and I’d like to follow the right process rather than just dropping a prompt into a thread.
This is a little different than a template, so I don’t think there’s an official way of doing it. If it’s specific to Sheets or Excel, it should likely go into “Spreadsheets/Google Sheets” or “Spreadsheets/Excel”. For templates, Tiller will review them and include them in the “Community Solutions” add-in so users can more easily download, but they haven’t officially supported community scripts in that way. AI prompts hasn’t been a thing to consider before now, so you’ll be breaking new ground. When you have something you’re ready to publish I’m happy to look it over, and if there are questions about how to best do it, I can reach out to some Tiller peeps. The key is making it useful to a broad spectrum of users, explaining clearly what it does and why someone would want to use it, and then documenting how to use it at a level that all users can understand and implement.
Saw this article today on CNBC about AI and financial advice. Check it out when you get a chance. Don’t rely on AI for personal finance advice, study finds. -David
Thanks, JP. That is very helpful.
It sounds like there isn’t yet a standard way to publish an AI-based workflow or prompt, which makes sense since this is newer territory for the Tiller community.
One challenge is that users may be working with different AI tools — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and others — and those tools do not all handle Google Sheets or larger transaction files the same way. I have already confirmed that Copilot does not seem suitable for this particular workflow, so I’m taking that off the list for now.
I’m continuing to test the prompt in Claude, and I also want to test versions in ChatGPT and Gemini. If I’m going to share this broadly, I’d like to give people at least a couple of realistic options and be clear about which tools have actually been tested.
I’ll keep refining the prompt and the documentation so it is useful for a broad range of users and easy to follow. I’ll also take a look at Clint’s request. If Clint can send me a short summary of what he would like to see, I can run that through the workflow and see what happens on my end.
Thanks again for offering to look it over and possibly reach out to the Tiller team when it is ready. I appreciate the guidance. Blaine
David,
Thanks for sending this. I looked over the article, and I agree with the main point.
AI should not be relied on for personal financial advice without human review and verification. That is going to remain the challenge until these tools become more reliable, especially with financial data.
For now, I see AI as useful for surfacing things to review, organizing information, and helping identify possible patterns — but not as something that should make decisions or replace a person checking the results.
I think it may still take a while before people are fully comfortable using AI in this area, and even then, clear limits and safeguards will be important.
Here in a follow up link from the article published in April. MIT’s Lo describes how to get an answer and how one should frame it. It’s trial and error. And why would one leave the deterministic outcome of a database or Tiller spreadsheet for something that has to be triple checked plus told I need you to be a fiduciary on top of it? It just adds added manual checks.
Sorry for the highlighting it just proves a point. One prompt can’t get you correct answers.
I am with David here. What’s the use of these? I can understand maybe searching for best discounts, which is not covered by Tiller. Maybe if you have a ton of CCs and don’t know the benefits/rewards, asking AI could be useful once a year. But otherwise, most questions seem to be deterministically covered by the data sheets.
Subject: Which AI assistants can actually read a Tiller sheet
Hey all,
Ran a quick test to see which AI assistants can actually open and read a Tiller Google Sheet before trying anything more elaborate. Results:
- Claude (Pro) — Works. Reads the Transactions tab directly and gets row count, headers, date range, and sign convention right.
- ChatGPT (Paid) — Works. Also read it correctly, though it takes a slower route (exports a copy first).
- Gemini (Paid) — Doesn’t work. It can’t reach the Transactions tab at all — its Drive access only sees the first tab. Worse, when pushed it guessed and reported made-up numbers instead of saying so.
- Copilot — Doesn’t work. No Google Drive access at all; upload-only. To its credit, it said so plainly instead of guessing.
Worth noting: all four were tested on paid tiers, so this isn’t a free-vs-paid thing — it’s about whether the assistant can actually reach live Sheet data, not just index a static copy.
Still waiting to hear back on transaction counts / template versions from you three before going further — let me know if you’ve had a chance to test on your end.
Best,
Blaine
Blaine- thanks for your QA efforts. But you have yet to report on whether the actual results were accurate or whether they timed out or were hallucinated (except for Gemini which couldn’t reach the tab in your prompt window). Just so you know Gemini is capable of reading the Transaction tab through an API interface like Tiller uses in AI Suggest. You say nothing about how this file was fed to your models. I am unclear about what prompt you even used. I’d have to use free versions if ChatGPT (I wouldn’t pay them for their junk) and Claude. I have the pro version of Gemini. The free versions of ChatGPT and Claude train their models based on query and output. Tbh I am going to have to bow out of this because I am not willing to use my tiller data for training models. I have no confidence in their answers either without verifying output.