Excel add in to show when during a month a recurring expenses happens. Also, is it possible to autocat a saved split?

Discussion
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Does anyone know of an excel add in to the Tiller Foundation Sheet that you can use to show which day of the month expenses are expected to occur. I am envisioning a calendar type sheet that reflects each day and, what if any, expenses are expected to occur during an upcoming month. Obviously, you would have to do something to “tag” a reoccuring expense so that Tiller would know what expenses show up each month.

Also, does anyone know of a way to autocat a saved split. For example, I have a saved split for my mortgage payment which splits the payment in mortgage, property taxes, and homeowners insurance. But each month I have tell Tiller to split the payment. Is there a way to autocat the split?

Thoughts?

Thanks

Bill Barnard

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Hello @bbarnard56, thanks for posting in the Tiller community. I was pondering on this myself the other day, how to identify reoccurring expenses. I’m not part of the product team so I can only suggest resources and some work arounds.

I like your idea, has my wheels spinning.
I’m going to attempt to mock up something. If I have some success I will report back :slight_smile:

-Alice
Tiller Evangelist

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Alice

Good to hear. I have all sorts of ideas but I don’t have the skills to actually do any of them. Let me know if I can help.

Bill

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Alice

I have given the proposed sheet some thought and experimented a little bit, and here are my ideas so far:

  1. The sheet would first have to examine the transactions over time and select monthly transactions. I added a tab to the foundation spreadsheet and tagged (“recurring”) the items that fit my criteria.

  2. The sheet would have to allow you to set a threshold dollar amount. I did that screen manually, but I would want the sheet to allow me to specify a threshold amount. I only want to see the monthly expenses that average over $ X.

  3. The sheet would have to allow you to schedule large items even if they don’t occur monthly. For example, I only pay my car insurance once a year, but that’s a large number. Obviously, it will not show up in my historical transactions unless I have more than one year of data in the transaction sheet.

  4. If the monthly amount varies, the sheet must return the average dollar amount. For example, my electric bill varies from month to month. If the sheet shows a dollar amount due on a given day, it will have to use an average of the amount paid.

Similarly, if the payment day varies (which it frequently does due to weekends, holidays, etc.), the sheet would have to show the “average” day that the payment is due. For example, if the light bill is due on the 16th but sometimes gets paid on the 15th or 18th due to a weekend or holiday, the sheet would have to show the “average” day of the 17th.

Bill

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Hi @bbarnard56, just brainstorming here. I started to create a column in my Tiller but realized that didn’t fully make sense as I didn’t need it each time. Have come to the conclusion that I need to set up a list of bills that have a countif higher than 1 and indicate a rule for the reoccurrence and use a formula to determine the next date that occurs. I’m unfortunately traveling at the moment for a funeral so I have played a little with how I would do this, but will need to really sit down and think it all out more fully later. Your ideas are good ones for me to experiment with. You’re right about annual, so it makes me think that your approach with a column might be the way to go except I can’t get past that it doesn’t need to be listed more than once.

Did you see the recurring payments template in the community solutions Add-on?

More later
Alice
-Tiller Evangelist

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Alice

Thanks. I am not seeing the “recurring payments template”. Is it called something else?

Bill

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Good question @bbarnard56, I am using the Google Sheets community solutions Add-on. Let me see where else I can find it.

This article talks about it, but it also says to use the Community Solutions Add-on.

Alice
-Tiller Evangelist

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Alice

The Transaction Tracker for Excel is the report that might be close to what you are describing. In hindsight, I wish I was using Google Sheets, but I started with Excel before I understood the differences between the two platforms. It would be tough to migrate to Google Sheets now.

Bill

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Hello @bbarnard56, I believe you could do both. If you log into your Tiller console and choose to create a Google Sheets spreadsheet you could play with that spreadsheet. I do this often, create a new spreadsheet for my Tiller data so that I can properly mess up my data :joy:. I love that I can play what if without affecting my actual financial spreadsheet. Just a thought if you wanted to see if you like the Sheets version.

This is some sanitized data in Google Sheets.
I inserted the recurring template from the community solutions Add-on for Google Sheets so you can see what it looks like.

Here is my thought, can you open this in Excel and copy the sheet over to your sheet and see if it still works? (It’s a hail mary)

I downloaded it as Excel, which will break some formulas but not the list of expenses.

I also added it to OneDrive with view access.

I am not sure if this is helpful, but I hope it is.

-Alice
Tiller Evangelist

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