@jpfieber Iâm impressed by your responsiveness with this forum! Itâs great.
Ok on the credit card question. I was pretty sure I just wasnât fully grasping it.
I think I found an issue with the new version of budget status (V1.20). Column BC (Prior Budget) in V1.20 is now adding the current monthâs budget, and then adding the current monthâs budget again in Col BE (Current Budget), whereas V1.0 did it correctly, and did not include the current monthâs budget in the Prior Budget column. I noticed that a lot of my numbers were a lot higher than they should have been, and then went digging.
Semi-unrelatedâwhere is all the proprietary programming happening for the tiller worksheets and yours? Itâs hard to diagnose or dig into calculations that arenât immediately obvious when all I have to work with are values. It makes sense for the copyright, but Iâm curious.
Cheers and thanks again.
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How exactly do you update Tiller Money Community Solutions? My Budget Plan is still on 1.8.1. When I go into the manage solutions extension the only options I am given are to restore the sheet. Does it update automatically or do I have to manually update it when updates are pushed?
Budget Status isnât in the gallery yet, so youâll need to re-copy the shared template from the first post in this thread, then copy/paste the items you added to the green cells from your old sheet to the new one (I usually do a âPaste Values Onlyâ), then delete the old sheet and rename the new one.
Thanks for the quick reply. I probably would have answered my question anyways if I had kept reading as it pertains to this sheet but I still needed to answer my question in regards to other community solutions such as your budget plan. Are those automatically updated or do I have to update them manually through the extension? Just asking for future reference. Thanks
When itâs available in the extension, youâll still have to tell it to do the upgrade, it doesnât happen automatically, mostly because usually youâll have to manually migrate data from the archived version to the new version.
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I have my credit card listed as a category, which is what I have always done, although I list any payments made towards it in my transactions under the same credit card category. That category is listed as an expense and tracked as a debt (both separate columns). Would I put the credit card category under my checking account pool (where most of my expenses come out)? All my expenses in general are categorized into different categories such as entertainment, pets, food, auto, etc. The payments made towards my credit card come out of my expenses if that makes sense. Most of my transactions are paid on my credit card and I just pay it throughout the month so I can get points as I currently have no debt, thankfully. But in the future, I would like any advice on how to categorize debt I may accrue in general. Thatâs one of the few things I have struggled with within my budget.
Not sure Iâm following your workflow. Seems like you might be treating the credit card as an âexpenseâ when itâs really just a middle-man between your bank and the places you purchase things. (BTW, I also use a credit card for most purchases to get cash back). Hereâs how I intended the workflow to function, which works well with budgeting and other templates within Tiller:
- Setup a category called âGroceriesâ (an expense) and assign it to a Budget Status pool called âSharedâ.
- The Shared pool is funded by the âJoint Checkingâ account.
- Setup a budget item in the Budget Plan template for the âGroceriesâ category, providing $500 per month.
- In Budget Status, the âGroceriesâ category will show $500 more âCurrently Availableâ for this month (due to the budgeted amount), and the âJointâ pool will show $500 less in âCurrently Availableâ since that money has been promised to âGroceriesâ this month, so it shouldnât be available for anything else.
- Use the credit card to purchase groceries. When the transaction arrives in Tiller, it gets categorized as âGroceriesâ, which reduces the âCurrently Availableâ for the âGroceriesâ category in Budget Status.
- At the end of the credit card period, money will get transferred from the âJoint Checkingâ account to the credit card company, generating two transactions: one from the money leaving the âJoint Checkingâ account, and one from the credit card company getting the payment. Each will get categorized as a transfer in Tiller.
Budget Status wonât care about the credit card payment, it already reflected changes when you budgeted the money, and then spent part of that budget. The only time Budget Status will change the âCurrently Availableâ of the pool is when money is budgeted against it, or if the budget is exceeded on a category assigned to that pool.
Hope this makes sense and helps you understand either if it will work with your workflow, or if you want to adjust your workflow to work with it!
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That is exactly what I have been doing. I do however have the credit card categorized as an expense but although I have it enabled I do not have anything budgeted toward it so it never counted against my budget. I did it this way until I could figure out the best way to categorize that specific category. Using your workflow I could leave it as is (blank but enabled as an expense) or I can just change it to transfers in the categories sheet. The thing that confuses me at the moment is the fact that I do however pay my credit card balance each month. The excess amount I spend outside of my budget would technically be considered a credit loan if I donât have enough cash to technically cover that expense so, therefore, would be an expense outside of my normal budget. The same thing would be applied to a loan I may choose to take out in the future for whatever reason. I guess I did it this way after watching a webinar for the savings budget where credit cards were treated as expenses. Or maybe I am just overthinking this.
You have to think of your CC payment as a Transfer. Thatâs how Iâve always done it across multiple personal financial platforms. We put everything but the mortgage on a CC.
Simple example:
- Monthly expenses are $10,000.
- You budget for that $10,000 across all of your Categories on that sheet.
- At the end of the month, you send a $10,000 payment to your CC company to pay it off. Log the $10,000 payment as a Transfer.
If you log it as an Expense, then you have just logged that you spent $20,000 when in reality you only spent $10,000. The CC payment is a pass through.
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@jpfieber What is the âCommitted or Debtâ column in Section 5 pulling from and what exactly does it mean?
Thanks.
That number represents money that has been set aside for budgeting for this month (Committed), or money that was spent beyond the budget (Debt):
(Transfers In - Transfers Out + Prior Budget + Current Budget) - (Prior Activity + Current Activity)
This is pulled from column BG. Subtracting that from the current balance of the pool then gives us how much we have left to spend (Currently Available) while still leaving enough for the remaining budgeted funds that havenât yet been spent.
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@jpfieber
Thoughts on the prior budget / current budget change in V1.20 that I mentioned above? Iâm seeing the current month being double countedâŚie summed into the prior budget column when it shouldnât be.
Budget status 1.0 and 1.20 are showing different totals in several columns due to this issue.
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I finally got a chance to look at that, youâre right. CT31 was supposed to calculate the month prior to this month, but was coming up with this month instead, so as you suggested, it was being summed twice further down the road. I didnât notice it on mine because my budget period starts in January, so there wasnât yet a prior budget to be summed. I just added the fix to the shared template and bumped the version number to 1.21. Everyone should do this update (rename current sheet, copy new sheet, copy/paste as values green data from old to new) or come February most will find their numbers incorrect. Thanks @kyle.sullivan.me for pointing this out!
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Awesome, thx for looking at it! My budget starts in November since I just joined tiller so I had those additional months showing the issue.
Hmm, this isnât clicking for me. Not sure why. Conceptually, I understand what you are saying here but what Iâm expecting to see isnât remotely close to the actual number displayed. Iâve simplified mine to 1 Pool : 1 account to try and make this simpler. Because we are in Month 1 of a new year there is no prior data to pull into that formula above so its effectively Committed or Debt = Current Budget - Current Activity(?) for January.
My Committed or Debt number is way under what Iâve set aside for this month. And totaling up BG doesnât equate to that field either. I canât find a way to back into the number being displayed no matter how many permutations I try.
Iâm missing something obviousâŚ
Hopefully itâs working as intended, hereâs how I intended:
Lets say you have budgeted $100 for January for your Widget category. On January 1 the account thatâs linked to the pool assigned to the Widget category had a balance of $1000. A few days ago you bought a widget for $25.
- We know you still have $75 committed to the Widget category ($100 budgeted - $25 spent)
- We know that the $25 you already spent has been deducted from the account balance, leaving a current balance of $975.
- Itâs January, so weâre not counting any prior budget or activity
So, if the current balance is $975, and you still have $75 budgeted/committed, your âCurrently Availableâ for the pool should be $900.
Is yours not behaving that way, or were you expecting it was doing something else?
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Concept the way youâve laid it out makes sense to me and I put this in a sheet to see the math. But when I use my own numbers it doesnât work.
| Description |
|
Formula |
| Total Pool Funds |
$1,000.00 |
|
|
|
|
| Expense Budget |
$100.00 |
|
| Expense Spent |
$25.00 |
|
|
|
|
| New Pool Balance |
$975.00 |
Total Pool Funds - Expense Spent |
| Currently Available |
$900.00 |
New Pool Balance - Expense Budget - Expense Spent |
When I plug my own numbers into this table the discrepancy (or where Iâm missing something) is that Iâm expecting the Expense Budget number to be the same number as my total monthly budget amount for expensesâŚwhat you are calling Committed or Debt. The Committed or Debt number being shown is only 75% of my total expense budget for the month.
If I remove my total monthly budget expense number and use your Committed or Debt number then all the math equates to what you have in Budget Status, but I have no idea how that Committed or Debt number was calculated. All the other numbers are good and I can find where they come from.
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The âCurrent Budgetâ range is defined in cell CV30 (gets the current months budget numbers from the Categories sheet), and should be displayed for each category in column BE. Column S then shows the those numbers filtered so Transfers arenât included, and categories that donât have assigned pools arenât included. Keep in mind that all these numbers are positive, regardless if they are income or expense. Polarity is handled in other formulas only where it makes a difference. So simply adding all the budget items probably wonât give you a useful number (unless you only budgeted expenses).
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I just added a quick overview video to the documentation in the first post.
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Iâll ask one more question and then Iâm throwing in the towel because Iâm clearly not smart enough to figure this out! Lol.
If my Expense Budget for the month is $10,000, should I expect my Committed or Debt number to be $10,000 considering the following:
- We are in Month 1 so we have no prior budget or activity influencing the numbers.
- I havenât spent beyond my budget creating a âdebtâ scenario.