First off, sorry I didn’t find Tiller earlier. Wonderful product and a strong community of users. A welcome change from the corporate overlords who want to sell my hard earned data to the highest bidder.
I use tags pretty extensively. I have a couple years worth of transactions and I keep my categories fairly high level. I then use tags to get a bit more granular. Think “Utilities” as the category and “Gas” or “Electric” for the tags (not sure why I had to use quotes there…)
Anyway, I wrote a little script in a new sheet that allows me to bulk edit my tags. As an example, I want to find all the transactions that have the description (I call them merchants) Nicor and then tag them all with “gas” (there I go again with the quotes.) Or, delete all the tags for a particular merchant without going through them one by one.
Would anyone be interested in that as a community add-on? It’s super simple for me, but I don’t want to try and figure out how to bring it to the masses unless anyone else needs it.
Of course, I’m sure there’s a better and easier way to do this already, but it was fun to create and works like a charm.
Tom (I really wanted to put quotes around my name. Such self control.)
Welcome to tiller! I agree this is a great product and community. I have learned a lot from the other users and taken advantage of many of the available sheets contributed by the community.
This is a great idea. There may be some interest in community availability for this. I use tags in a limited sense, but I get more detailed all the time or completely change up how I am doing something, and making changes does get tedious.
Sounds interesting and worth sharing. I don’t think it can be included in the “Tiller Community Solutions” because they avoid scripting, but I think you can still share it in the templates area. Here’s a post that talks about how to approach that.
In your example about electricity and utilities, I use Utilities for the group, and Gas or electric for the category. Do you have other uses for tags that go beyond categories/sub category capabilities?
One possible use for me for tags is when the tag value is not related to category or sub category. For example, I have Group = travel, category = airfare, but I want to track all expenses related to my Greece trip. I can then apply that greece tag to different categories including airfare, lodging, activities, etc.
Another use I’ve been considering is when I have Spending that’s related to multiple projects. For example, I purchased some tools that are used for two different projects. I want to track expenses for each project, but then I need to add two different values to the same tag column. Hard to get decent reporting out of this since we have a flat file not a relational database.
That’s an excellent example of why tags can be important. My example with utilities was very basic, but where tags really come in handy for me is when there’s a big event. We took a big family trip to Europe this summer and having the ability to tag to categories like restaurant and transportation made reporting on that trip so easy. My daughter’s wedding was another good example. We had lots of different things that were associated to the wedding, but not easily categorized for that purpose. I could have set up a special category for that purpose, but tags seem so much easier.
Your example of travel is right on the nose. Now I just have to control my OCD and not overdo it with tags. That can certainly happen too.
One of the most valuable features of Tiller, in my opinion, is the ability to make categories and tags as broad or narrow as we want.
I keep my categories broad, with Home & Living Expense using the most tags. For example, my Home & Living Expenses category has Tags for Home Improvement, Insurance, Maintenance/Repairs, Utilities, and Property Taxes. Someone else might prefer to make separate categories for Home Improvement, Insurance, etc., and then use tags to get more granular.
For travel, my group = Travel, and category = Travel Related. Every travel expense for a particular vacation is categorized as Travel Related. The only tag I use for travel is to note the destination, same as you’re doing.
I used tags mainly for travel and annual expenses - I categorize travel, then tag food, flight, etc. For annual expenses, I simplified the majority of my once a year charges to annual expenses category then tag kindle, audible, renters insurance, AAA, and the like, though Auto insurance is in it’s own because OCD.
I also try to tag all of my transfers because I was losing my place with them. Each side gets the same tag, but also notes added. I transfer to different buckets within a savings account, but also when I open a CD or it matures.
I guess I’m still a little confused. Is no one else using Groups/Categories? I’ve seen a lot of references to categories and tags, where in my opinion the same structure can be accomplished groups and categories. The on area where I could use tags is when the tag value is pretty independent of category/group, such as my example around a project that might require spending in Tools, Materials, etc.
Wow Dave. I thought I had a mind for detail. That’s incredible.
My love of tags is due to the fact that you can have a many to one ration, and categories are limited to one. It’s true that you can have multiple categories per group, but you can only have one per transaction. I like the freedom of being able to tag a single transaction with multiple tags (as many as I want.) To be fair, this could be done with Groups and Categories, but it becomes a little more complex IMHO. My Categories and Groups are much simpler. I guess that’s the beauty of Tiller. You can cook the dish any way you want!!
I use groups for broader things, but tag mainly when I want more detailed information. My categories for the most part are granular enough. But like I said in the case of travel. I want only travel as category, because that is what I am budgeting for; I tag the individual purchases so if I decide to go back for more details they are there. I don’t want the items tagged as separate categories because I tried that, and it made my sheet too busy and I lost track of what I needed from the sheet.
yes, tags are the only way to do multiple categories for the same item.
So far I’ve only used tags to track expenses on a project or two.
once you’ve tagged something, what do you do with it? How do you report on it? I don’t think tags work with pivot tables or the monthly or yearly budget, just wondering what people are doing?
Not doing anything with tags yet, other than satisfying my need to organize.
I do plan on building a simple sheet that allows me to report on transactions with tags. It will really help me understand my budget as I head into retirement. The fuel tag is especially good for me, as it will help us understand if we should buy an EV in the coming year. I know I could do that with a category, but I also tag which car is getting the fuel, so two tags on one transaction (plus a vacation tag if that is appropriate.)
There is a community built report for Tags here, so you don’t necessarily need to build your own.
I use categories and groups for budgeting - as each dollar has to be in exactly 1 category when creating a budget. So I have Gas/Automobile and Gas/Vacation.
But tags could be useful for tracking expenses across multiple categories, as you suggest, gas for which car? airfare for which vacation?
Since my tag use is minimal, I don’t use them in reports. I keep them more for a FYI look at things. But to be honest, I don’t do much of anything with reports.
If you’re used to a Category > Subcategory structure think about Groups as the bigger bucket (what you used to call “Category”) and Categories fall into that bucket (what you used to call “Subcategory”).
It works for my type of expense and budget tracking.
Interesting. I did not know that the Group column was not enabled on the Transactions tab by default. I guess I turned it on years ago. It’s very useful on the transactions tab to filter all the food spending for the month at the group level.
And I see that the original groups in the template are pretty high level, which might drive people to create a group/category/tag structure, rather than just expanding groups to be more granular.
Another observation: In financial planning, and particularly for retirement projections, it’s typical to divide all spending into 2 buckets: Essential and Discretionary. It would be helpful to assign every category to an Essential or Discretionary bucket, populate that column on the Transactions tab, and do budget planning with that in mind.
And it does force you to answer the question: Do I REALLY need this?
Love that last sentence Dave. I need to stop and ask myself that question more often. How often will I use that oddball tag that I spent a half hour assigning to my transactions, or am I just doing it as a distraction from what I really should be doing?
I followed the same help guide for subcategories that @Clint.C referenced.
All of my budgeting Categories are organized under a Group of Essential or Discretionary. At the end of the year, I use the Tags Report to review my total spend in each category and set each category’s budget for the new year.
