Hi Tiller Support,
I use Tiller for our household budget, and I’d like to be able to view and analyze my husband’s expenses separately from my own. Since I’m not very comfortable with Excel formulas, I’m hoping for a straightforward solution.
Any guidance would be really appreciated. Thank you!
I did this using Autocat and adding a column. My wife’s credit card number and mine show up differently, even though they go to the same account. I isolated the numbers that show up when she uses hers vs. when I use mine, and created an Autocat rule that updates the “Spent By” column I added. There’s also a secondary rule that autocategorizes from our individual checking/debit accounts.
I haven’t actually gotten around to creating a budget breakdown sheet of how much of each category was spent by which of us.
You need to figure out some sort of marker to distinguish the transactions. You could use tags, categories, groups, or a custom column to do so. I would probably recommend a tag. Hopefully you and your husband have separate accounts, that way you can set up an automatic autocat rule to apply said marker. Otherwise, you’re going to have to go through your expenses manually to assign it.
Thank you. I’m not sure how to do this but C will do my best to figure this out.
Which part do you not know how to do? Presumably you’re using some sort of Tiller or community sheet to review your expenses, does it provide the option to filter based on account?
The simplest possible approach that wouldn’t require making any changes to your data would be to identify which accounts are yours and which are your husbands and then filter your data to see only your accounts or only your husband’s accounts. This will be tedious if you have many accounts, hence why mine and pkrug’s recommendation goes a step forward to automate this but if you aren’t tech savvy that might not be feasible for you.
If you share a screenshot of what your sheet looks like (remove personal data if need be), I would have a better idea of how to implement the filter you need.
I’m team custom column like @pkrug539 mentioned. If it were me i would go with custom column so that auto cat could assist.
Hi there,
I’m trying to separate my spending from my husband’s spending in the Tiller
workbook. I can filter by account on the Transactions tab, but I’m not sure
how to set up separate monthly budgets for each of us.
I’m not very Excel-savvy, so I’m looking for the simplest way to:
Keep our expenses separated, and
2.
Create a monthly budget for each person within the same workbook.
Can you point me to the easiest method or steps to do this with the current
template?
Thanks,
Marla
I do this. In fact, we budget and track his / hers / ours separately. I’ve tried most of the suggestions I see from other people.
Attempting to track by account is doomed to failure. There will always be something that comes from the “wrong” account.
Tags and custom columns have too many side effects in the various sheets for the Foundations template or add-ons. Especially if you’re not comfortable rewriting formulas, I wouldn’t recommend either.
What turns out to work most simply is Categories, e.g. Meals Out - His ; Meals Out - Hers ; Meals Out - Ours for example. There’s no need to duplicate (in our case triplicate) all the categories, we can’t see a need for Clothing - Ours, for example. This has the advantage of working seamlessly with all the existing templates without having to alter any formulas. AutoCat can use the differentiated categories. Where you’ll need to do manual work is producing separate his/hers/ours budget reports. Although even that isn’t too bad if you use a pivot table, and you can filter on the his/hers/ours part of the category name.
Thank you, everyone, for the guidance and support.
Dennis, thanks. Your approach is something I’ve tried on a smaller scale, and I can expand on it. What I’m still unsure about is how to create separate budget reports for each of us. That’s exactly what I’m trying to accomplish, but I’m not familiar with pivot tables or more advanced Excel tools.
Any additional assistance you can provide would be greatly appreciated.
Pivot tables are a superpower in spreadsheets - well worth investing the time to learn to use them. There are a ton of tutorials out on the web that will do a better job explaining the nuts and bolts than I can do here.
For the purpose of budget reporting, imagine that you set up a table that takes all of your transactions, grouped by category and summed by month, giving you 12 cells of data per category for the year. Then filter the category so you only see the categories with “- His” in the name. Poof, a budget report for “His”. Change the filter for “Hers”, and again for “Ours” to get the other reports.
All that grouping, sorting, and filtering is done with a few buttons and selections in the pivot table wizard, no programming or function writing needed. It’ll take a few tries to get it working, and then you’ll wonder why you thought it was hard.
Good luck!
Hello @seltzerclaudio, perhaps this article might help with how to set up tags.
One of the most flexible ways to distinguish your spending from your spouse’s without messing up your main categories is by adding a Tags column. This is a favorite method for many of us who love spreadsheets because it lets you add that extra layer of detail to your money.
Here is a quick tip on how to set it up:
-Alice
Tiller Evangelist
@seltzerclaudio there isn’t a built in way to have separate budgets for each of you that isn’t co-mingled in some way. Tags won’t show on the budget sheets at all so that may not be super helpful.
The recommended approach when you want to see separate budgets for each of you is to use Groups and unique categories.
The section in the help article linked below is our best practice guidance on that. It essentially will allow you to have a budget section for you and a budget section for your spouse and then a combined budget section (if applicable). It’s all organized around the groups and categories that you set up in the Categories sheet, which will flow into your Monthly and Yearly Budget sheets.
From an officially supported perspective, that’s the best we can offer right now.
Hi Heather, Thank you for sharing this and the resources. Very helpful.
