I just wanted to mention that when I purchased the Tiller product, it was the result of being overwhelmed at tax prep time. I had hoped I could use the product to pull my recent year’s transactions to easily come up with a summary of my business spending to send off to my tax accountant. Unfortunately, I ended up spending many hours pulling historical transactions from a number of bank and credit card accounts to pull together a comprehensive picture of that year. I was frustrated, but determined to accomplish it—and I did—but it was days worth of work. That said, I recently spoke with a friend who is at those exact same crossroads…she is tearing her hair out trying to pull together 2022 expenses for her small business tax return…and she ran into the same wall I did in that Tiller would only pull 3 months worth of data automatically.
My friend and I are both authors and we already use some pretty industry-standard budgeting spreadsheets that are specific to our businesses, so neither of us has any interest in using any of the budgeting features of the product. For us, the most valuable functions in this tool are the ability to quickly pull and categorize banking transactions from multiple bank and credit card accounts so that we can create a simple pivot table to summarize expenses/income by tax category just to simplify tax time data gathering. It seems to be a very focused need that no one else is satisfying, without a lot of other functionality and bells and whistles that add a lot of unnecessary complexity. You come the closest with the least amount of overhead—as long as one begins on Jan 1st for the following year. But the time when most people are looking for this tool is when they are tearing their hair out in the middle of crunch time. Simply extending the timeframe for the data pull to 12-18 months could turn this tool into a lifesaver for small “creative” business people like authors. Part of the issue with authors is that we often have many different projects going on and most accounting software packages only allow for a couple of projects (at a much higher price point), or they lock you into a “rental housing” business model. So having a low-cost tool to pull and categorize transactions (retroactively) provides a lot of flexibility to the single proprietor.
Just wanted to share this, in case you find it is an overlooked market segment that might be easy for you to satisfy.
The 90-day transaction history limit isn’t set by Tiller, but by the 3rd party data aggregation partner, Yodlee. If you need to populate data going further back you can utilize the CSV import process which is well-documented in the article How to Manually Import Your Bank Data. Note that the instructions are tailored to Google Sheets, but the process should be very similar in Excel.
@lcgraves thanks for the feedback. I definitely understand your use case. Yodlee has limitations as @cculber2 noted, and banks have limitations so it varies by bank as @richl noted. We’ll include a review of the look back period in our work and focus on rock solid feeds.
Yeah, I saw this and it is basically what I did. But doing it times 10+ accounts took me a couple of days in between living life. LOL It is very time-consuming and when I forwarded it to my friend, she was so overwhelmed (not a heavy Excel or Google docs user) that she opted to set it aside and do her taxes this year manually and then try to use Tiller on a go-forward basis.
This is a big problem with your product. I think as a large customer of Yodlee you need to talk to them. When you set up for the first time you need to download last years data so you can set up the budget for the next year. I understand every data pull shouldn’t try to pull the last 3 years worth of data, but you should be able to have a separate data pull that gets historic data. The whole reason we are paying you money is so you can pull our data. If manually pulling old data was fun and easy, we would not be paying for your service.
I understand I am just starting out as a new user, but isn’t this one of those pain points that every user is going to have. If every user has this problem, and it is a good reason for people to cancel their subscription and not be paid users, wouldn’t it make sense to prioritize this.
I wonder how many customers or potential customers would be happy to pay an extra one-time fee to pull the extra data? That might be another way to look at that feature - as a paid back-fill for those who want it. That would also help offset the cost of anyone subscribing for one month a year for tax purposes.
That’s an excellent thought. I would have been willing to do so. But then I would not want to subscribe for one month of the year for tax purposes because there are a lot of my purchases that Tiller can’t correctly categorize and I don’t want to look back over an entire year to sort personal Amazon purchases from business…easier to do a week or two at a time than a year’s worth. But that’s just me. LOL
Yeah, I can easily see it being a non-refundable one-time upgrade option. You might have to play with the pricing strategy a bit to find the right combination.
I asked the friend I had recommended Tiller to if she would have been willing to pay an additional fee for more than 30-days-worth of data and she said yes, definitely…especially given that it was a direct recommendation from someone she knew.
Agree with the posts in this thread requesting this feature. Coming to Tiller from Money in Excel and it pulled two years (as long as the financial institution) had the data which was very helpful in the first pull. Also, based upon richl’s great research this should be doable through Yoddle.
This support entirely depends on the data available at the provider source
This means that the amount of historical data varies by institution.
The initial pull when you add an institution is around 60 days unless the institution will not provide us more than that. A subsequent refresh can actually pull more (up to a year), but once again this varies by institution.
