I’ve been using a single Tiller sheet for tracking both personal and business expenses, but I’m finding some limitations with my current approach. Many transactions like tax payments and travel expenses naturally fall into both personal and business realms.
My Current Setup
I’ve been using personal and business as my main groups, but this creates confusion when a category like “tax payments” needs to exist in both areas.
Possible Solutions
Would it be more effective to:
Use tags to identify whether something is personal or business-related?
Create categories that aren’t tied to the personal/business distinction (like simply “Tax Payments” or “Travel”)?
For those using Tiller with mixed finances, how do you organize categories that naturally cross between personal and business? What group structure works best for maintaining clean reporting while still separating these expenses for tax purposes?
Do you agree with this response form ChatGPT?
Define Expense-Type Category Groups and Use Tags for Business vs. Personal
Start with a master sheet that includes all accounts. Consulting two sheets to resolve a question is a big pain. Create (an) additional sheet(s) for a subset of your accounts if you find it necessary or useful, but keep in mind that any redundancy compromises data integrity. You might modify or annotate something in one place that won’t appear in the other.
Groups for Business and Personal can segregate categories that are discrete to one purpose or the other. Since budget numbers roll up to Groups, this allows for distinct reports.
Create parallel categories like Personal Taxes and Business Taxes where transactions will fall into both groups. Splitting a transaction to apportion it to multiple categories can be helpful here, and allows for more granular annotation and reporting.
Use Tags to capture transactions that span categories and groups. Unlike groups and categories, multiple tags can be appended to each transaction, so it is a versatile technique. However, it can grow unwieldy, so limiting its use to less common scenarios is advisable. Some of the Tiller Community solutions that support Tags can help unlock the possibilities here.
As the to ChatGPT response you linked, I have some quibbles. You can commit to Business and Personal as your parent group types, or you can commit to expense groups like Taxes and Travel. Each approach will impose hard restrictions on all your data, and you’ll be hard put to overcome them. Build within these limitations, and lean on split transactions and Tags for more esoteric situations.
