New user here, using the trial version of Tiller. I’ve already created a google sheets dashboard that I’d like to import but I don’t see an option to do this? I do not want to use the Foundation template. I tried to delete all the tabs from the Foundation template and just copy over the tabs from my other Google Sheets, but it won’t let me delete the “Yearly Budget” tab. Can someone help give some guidance here.
If it’s not a template based off of Tillers Foundation Template, you are likely to run into problems. The back-end that imports transactions and balances is expecting to see certain sheets and particular column names, and if it doesn’t find them it’s likely it won’t work. Give it a try, but be ready to use the Version History to roll back. If you could provide a few more details about what it is you’re trying to import it would be easier to assist. If by ‘Dashboard’ you mean something with charts and graphs, it’s likely to need major changes to work with the Tiller infrastructure. You’re better off starting with the Tiller Foundation Template and convert your existing data to a csv file so Tiller can import it. There’s some info about that here: Import CSV Line Items
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You aren’t doing anything wrong! I ran into this exact same wall. Tiller’s backend is hardcoded to look for those specific Foundation template tabs, so if you try to delete them or graft your own complex dashboard on top, the sync breaks. I eventually gave up trying to force Google Sheets to do what I wanted. Instead of fighting their templates, I just let Tiller do what it does best: dump the raw data into a basic sheet. Then, I connected a real business intelligence engine (Power BI / SQL) to that raw data to handle my custom dashboards. Decoupling the data from the dashboard is the only way to get true flexibility without breaking their backend. I actually just spun up a live sandbox showing what this kind of high-speed, decoupled dashboard looks like if you want to see the difference it makes. I have a sample data dashboard that I presented in Excel Templates Under a Show & Tell post. To see the sample data site you don’t need anything but a username and password which i handed out in the post. Take a look, and if you ever want to completely break free from the Foundation template and hook your own data up to a real BI engine like this, shoot me a direct message. Happy to show you how the architecture works!
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Can you explain a bit about what your dashboard has? I know that there are other external sheets that have been created that rely on the core sheets, but use import range into their own sheets and do all the work in their own dashboard. This is an example that I can think of. You have to allow the access, but it imports the transaction data. You might look at how that is done to see if it fits your needs.
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Since Tiller seems to require some of the Foundation Template tabs to exist, you shouldn’t try to delete them. You can Hide the ones you don’t want to see, and add your own tabs copied from your other sheets.
I spend most of my time with a custom dashboard tab, a custom tab with all my scheduled bills, the Tiller Transactions tab, and a couple of tabs from Tiller Community solutions. I hide most of the Tiller Foundation tabs as I rarely look at them, though occasionally I do. My custom dashboard and bills tabs use information from various Tiller Foundation tabs but they do not need to be visible, they just need to be present.
Hey @mysterytea,
Would you mind sharing a screenshot FO with your custom scheduled billes tab looks like.
I feel that its one of the good looking missing template from the lineup that we would need to get. There are a few out there but they heavily rely on manuel work to function.
Regards!
Hey everyone, thank you for the responses! honestly, when I first read through everything I was ready to give up on Tiller because it sounded too complicated to try and customize the default template to my needs. However, I played around with Claude this weekend and realized that I could just give Claude direct access to the Google Sheets through the Google Drive connector, have it update the categorizations/autocat tabs based on how its set up in my original dashboard, and just recreate the dashboard in Claude but maintain Tiller as the source data for transactions and categorizations. I am including screenshots of the original Google Sheets dashboard and the Claude one. as you can see, my dashboard includes a few custom views for areas that I want to pay closer attention to - for instance, tracking food spending by different categories, cumulative spending by week, and split between fixed vs flexible expenses. The Google Sheets dashboard has specific formulas to calculate all these different metrics, contained in a separate tab. Now the calculation layer is embedded in Claude, and I like the visuals it added. the only downside is its very data intensive to set all of this up, so I am having to build this out in chunks because I keep hitting Claudes session usage limit 
Anyway, open to hearing additional feedback/comments!
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You are running into the exact wall that forced me to completely rebuild
The issue you are hitting with Claude is that flat file architecture (like spreadsheets) just isn’t designed to act as a relational database. When you feed a flat file into an LLM, you will inevitably hit token/data limits because the AI is trying to read and calculate thousands of rows of text at once.
This is exactly why I moved my data into a true SQL database engine. It doesn’t use an LLM chat interface, but it natively handles all the specific views you just listed (cumulative weekly spending, fixed vs. flexible splits, category isolation) in milliseconds without ever hitting a data limit.
The learning curve to get those insights is basically zero—you just click a visual filter instead of writing an AI prompt.
I know I mentioned my project previously, but since you are clearly pushing the boundaries of what flat files can do, I’d highly encourage you to jump into the sample data sandbox I linked in my Show & Tell post. I am actively looking for power users like you to test the limits of a true database engine.