I’m coming from YNAB and looking to get everything setup to give Tiller a shot in the new year. I’ve got a Google sheet setup and am using the Budget Plan community add-on, but want to double check my thinking here to make sure that I’m not going about this incorrectly.
My situation is that I have several annual expenses (car insurance, property taxes, etc) that I save monthly toward and already have money set aside in my savings for these purposes. My thinking is that I should manually enter these amounts in my Jan 2023 budget column, and then have the Budget Plan ongoing calculations start with February. I think this would acknowledge the already earmarked funds and then auto-budget the necessary funds going forward.
Am I correct in this thinking? Any suggestions or advice?
I’ve struggled with similar situations, and it seems that how to handle this varies. I like to put the actual payment date as the “Start Date” in Budget Plan. Then, you can either set the frequency to “Annual” and have the only payment show up in that month, or you can set the frequency to “Annually-AVG-Year” and have it spread equally over all 12 months, which it sounds like better represents how you’re actually handling the funds (setting aside money for the payments). Neither is right or wrong, in the end it depends what you’re trying to get out of the budgeting process I guess.
I don’t think I did a good job of explaining my question, so I’ll give it another shot.
I’m moving from YNAB and have several savings goals and annual bills that I’ve already saved some amount toward. This money is sitting in my savings account.
When I’m setting up Tiller and the Budget Planner, how can I change my first month’s budget to recognize these dollars and allocate them toward each of the categories so that I’m not starting at zero?
I attempted to manually do this for January, with the Budget Planner starting in February, but the January monthly budget shows an extremely negative cash flow because the amount saved is significantly larger than the income for the month…
Budget Plan isn’t where you need to make changes, since it isn’t really the budget that you want to alter. It’s where you see the status or results of your budget that needs to reflect the ‘carry over’ of money. Using my Budget Status template you could use the Category Transfer tool to ‘deposit’ funds into the category (just choose a “transfer to” category and not a “transfer from” category). The Savings Budget template (available in the Community Solutions extension) also offers a ‘Savings’ tool that would allow you to add money to a category. I think either of these would accomplish what you’re looking for.
If you’re using the Savings Budget, @llsessions, I’d recommend just “Adjust ± Modifies” workflow set to “Savings” to set your starting category balances for the new year.
