Although the Tiller Balance Sheet is excellent at summarizing my assets, I created my own Excel spreadsheet with much more detailed information. Initially, I referenced the data from the Tiller Balance Sheet, but I encountered issues with the data shifting. Extra lines would be added, or accounts would become ungrouped, causing my references to break. This required manual corrections multiple times a week. I attempted cell-naming, which worked temporarily, and tried several suggestions from Tiller without success.
One of Tiller’s suggestions inspired me to use more complex Excel functions, which I hadn’t explored before. After some trial and error, I found a solution that seems to be effective. As an example:
=VLOOKUP(“3141”, Balances!B:D, 3, FALSE) - Returns value of $5,467
In this formula:
• “*3141*” represents a unique identifier within the account name on the Balance Sheet (I used the last 4 digits of my account number, with a different reference for each account).
• Balances! refers to the Balance page of the Tiller spreadsheet.
• B:D specifies the range of cells where the account data could be found (literally all cells in columns B, C, and D).
• 3 indicates that the account balance is in the third column of the specified range (column D).
• FALSE ensures an exact match for the identifier “3141” within the range.