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.
Is this supposed to say that transactions will fall into either group? I’m confused because you it sounds like you are using categories and groups interchangeably here. I’m sure that’s not what you mean. To clarify, my understanding is that
transactions can be uncategorized or categorized into a single category (not many categories)
groups can contain many categories
categories can belong to a single group
So is the suggestion to
Define a Taxgroup
Define Personal Taxes and Business Taxescategories in the Tax group
Here is my current schema, for the curious (suggestions welcome!):
My categories
Category Group Type
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Phone Bills Expense
Utilities Bills Expense
Parking Business Expense
Other Business Expense
Software Business Expense
Equipment Business Expense
Workspace Business Expense
Accounting Business Expense
Payroll Business Expense
Donation Charity Expense
Meals Discretionary Expense
Gear & Clothing Discretionary Expense
Home Improvements Discretionary Expense
Subscriptions Discretionary Expense
House Cleaning Discretionary Expense
Haircut Discretionary Expense
Shopping Discretionary Expense
Gift Discretionary Expense
Amazon Discretionary Expense
Tuition Education Expense
Exercise Health/Wellness Expense
Health Insurance Health/Wellness Expense
Therapy Health/Wellness Expense
PT/Bodywork Health/Wellness Expense
Spiritual Health/Wellness Expense
Health Health/Wellness Expense
House Living Expense
Auto & Gas Living Expense
Charity Living Expense
Groceries Living Expense
Misc Living Expense
Rent Living Expense
Entertainment Living Expense
Education Living Expense
Repairs Living Expense
Pet Care Living Expense
Car Insurance Living Expense
Splitwise Living Expense
Interest Passive Income Income
Rewards Passive Income Income
Freelance Primary Income Income
Distributions Primary Income Income
Federal Income Tax Taxes Expense
State Income Tax Taxes Expense
Property Tax Taxes Expense
Transfer Transfer Types Transfer
CC Payment In Transfer Types Transfer
CC Payment Out Transfer Types Transfer
Reimbursement Transfer Types Transfer
Refund Transfer Types Transfer
Lodging Travel Expense
Airfare Travel Expense
Ground Transportation Travel Expense
Unknown Unknown Expense
Oh I see the confusion. The intent is that you’ll have some transactions that are for “meals - personal” and “meals - business” and they would go into either category, but not both
I recommend having business specific groups as well.
So the Group itself could be just “Business” or you can get more granular like “Business Overhead” and have several business specific groups.
I think for your reporting it will be easier to understand if the groups are also distinct so I wouldn’t put business and personal tax specific categories in a broad “Taxes” group because the rollup to the group totals would be co-mingled with business and personal.
I think your categories list looks pretty good. My only question is do you have income that’s specific to your business and then another source of income and would you want to break those into separate income groups?
We’ve been working on an updated guide for using Tiller with Small Business which you can find here.
Included is a example categories sheet with a couple different options, but these don’t reflect the case when transactions are co-mingled.
