Hi all, I’m new to Tiller and Google Sheets this year, and I’m porting over some tracking and visualization tools from my homebrew Excel workbook I’ve used for the last 7 years or so.
The one I haven’t been able to figure out how to create in Sheets is a stacked area chart showing net worth over time. Below is a screenshot of what I’m trying to do: dollars on the y-axis, time on the x-axis, and different accounts or types of accounts in different colors. For me, this all adds up to an easy visual of historic and current net worth.
I’ve imported my pre-Tiller monthly balance history for all accounts and found advice elsewhere recommending creating this graph based on a pivot table referencing the Balance History tab. However, some accounts don’t have balances for every month, creating gaps in the data that the pivot table doesn’t seem to handle correctly. The resulting graph is erratic and inaccurate.
Can anyone steer me to where things are going wrong, or to a better way to accomplish this? Thanks!
The gap problem you’re hitting is really common when some accounts don’t report every month. The pivot table approach falls apart because it treats a missing value as zero rather than carrying forward the last known balance — which completely distorts the chart.
The workaround that worked for me was to stop fighting the pivot table and instead build a helper range that forward-fills each account’s last known balance for any month where data is missing. Once every account has a value for every month, the stacked area chart work well.
Mark’s suggestion of using the Net Worth template as a base is solid — it already handles this internally, which is why it produces cleaner results than a raw pivot table against Balance History.
About a year ago I built out the net worth tracker so that I could select daily, weekly, monthly intervals as well as customized ranges and account types. A drop-down menu allows me to choose intervals and ranges. A column of specific accounts and groups allows me to select what gets charted.
If someone from tiller could help i would be happy to upload it as a template, but I’m not interested in supporting it going forward.
