Phew! I spent a lot of time moving 2024 transactions from another system in Tiller. Every transaction has an assigned category and tag, and Autocat did a fair measure of the work for me.
I’m using most of the stock categories, and added a few for my own.
I have a list of about 20 tags
Objective: print a tag report for all of 2024 formatted to summarize/total my transactions as follows:
Tag 1
Category 1: $150
Category 2: $379
Category 3: $ 15
etc.
Tag 2
Category 1: $
Category 2: $
Category 3: $
etc. etc. until all my tags are included.
Question: Do I use the Category Rollup Report for this? Or is there something better?
Question: If using the Category Rollup Report, why does the tag dropdown only list a handful of my tags? See image below.
Any help appreciated! I’d love to get this done, finally!
Hi @billalpert , to be honest I have not used the category rollup template yet. Adding it to my list of things to play with (there are so many great templates!)
A pivot tab is probably a great place to start. Anytime you want to summarize data.
Here’s a quick way to build this in your Google Sheet:
Navigate to your Transactions sheet.
Highlight the columns of your transaction data
From the Google Sheets menu, choose Insert > Pivot table. This will create a new sheet for your report.
In the “Pivot table editor” that appears on the right, you’ll set up your report:
For Rows, click “Add” and select Tags. Click “Add” again and select Category. This creates the grouping you want.
For Values, click “Add” and select Amount. It should default to Summarize by: SUM.
For Filters, click “Add” and select Date. You can then filter to show only your 2024 transactions.
Thanks again for posting. This is the kind of question that helps everyone learn new ways to get more insight from their money. Keep them coming!
Congratulations on the full migration,@billalpert.
I know many users in our community use tags to help track and aggregate transactions more granularly. Unfortunately most of the reporting built does not report by tag with the exception of this one:
You can search the community and will find other user-created templates that may help with your task.
I think you’d want to think about the “Group” as the level you’re currently labeling “tag” and then you could use the Simple P&L template available in the Tiller Money Feeds add-on to get the report you’re looking for.
With Tiller + community workflows/templates there are two ways to use Tags:
At the transaction level by adding a column to the Transactions sheet called “Tags” - use the Tags Report to analyze by tag at the transaction level
At the category level (specifically for the rollup report) to add an extra layer of grouping to your categories in addition to the Group defined in the Categories sheet.
So if you’re only seeing some of your tags in the dropdown on that report generator it’s likely because you’ve mixed the two (e.g. you’ve applied tags at the Transactions level and at the Category level and you’re only seeing the ones assigned on the Categories sheet.)
The dropdown on that report page just acts as a filter so you can generate the report for a single Tag at a time when applied to the category level. Think if you ran a small business and you needed to generate a line item detail report to your accountant, you’d only have to tag the categories that are associated with the business expenses rather than needing to remember to tag individual transactions. Using the tag dropdown allows you to filter to just those expenses so all your personal co-mingled data doesn’t show up in that report.
While this paradigm does support greater flexibility/customizability when using Tiller, it is definitely confusing and thus why it’s not officially Tiller supported.
There is a community template that you can use for this, the Transaction Tags Report. I use this a lot, especially when we travel or do a project that covers multiple budget categories. It looks like that’s what you have in your screenshot.
You can also use multipe tags with commas, and I haven’t found it having any problem with spaces in my tags instead of underscores (but if that’s what makes sense to you, totally go with that!). I’m not sure why you would be having difficulty with the Filter on Tag dropdown; it looks like it’s pulling those fine into your All Tags there. I did at one point run into a problem with having too many tags, and there’s a way to fix that, but I don’t remember off the top of my head what it was.
As others mentioned, it’s a good idea to think of large category groups, then categories within those groups.
Tags seem to work best not as sub-categories, but as a way of unifying expenses that cross categories. For example, we recently took a trip to visit some family. That trip had expenses in categories such as groceries, gas, eating out, lodging, car maintenance, travel expenses (things like tolls and fees), and activities for the kids. I want to see what the whole trip cost us, and tags let me essentially filter that trip by all those categories to see what we spent our trip money on.
It does look to me like that’s what you want? If it is, I think that Transaction Tags Report is going to be your best bet.
Good luck, and let us know if you have any additional questions!
