Our Tiller Labs team is working to keep you efficient, inspired, and enabled with financial templates, tools and workflows. In our Tiller Labs Roundups, we keep you updated on our latest features and sheets.
This particular update is overdue in highlighting many improvements the observant might have noticed in the past months.
New Budget Period Rollup report
The longstanding Category Rollup report is great for getting line item detail for categories across a specified period. Nevertheless, I have found the output unsatisfying when reporting at the end-of-month against my budget.
Our brand-new Budget Period Rollup report, a variant of the Category Rollup Report, is designed to address the shortcomings, running atop the Tiller Money Monthly/Yearly Budget tooling.
- Runs on budget periods from your Categories sheet
- Shows by-period budgets along side each category with formula-driven rollups for groups and types
- Includes conditional formatting for favorable & unfavorable categories
- Includes row grouping to better manage large data sets
- Displays a header row with budgeted, actual and net cashflow
Personally, I needed something like this to understand where the rubber met the road. I’d often wonder, “So I’m -$500 on Groceries for April, but what charges drive that?” This report will help you understand where your plan meets your spending reality (to better make needed adjustments).
You can find the new report via the Report Type dropdown in the Category Rollup report menu. If you give it a try, let me know what you think!
Migration Helper workflow improvements
The Tiller Labs Migration Helper will help you migrate your additions to your Tiller spreadsheets— e.g. categories, splits, manual balances, etc.— from an old “source” Tiller Money spreadsheet to a new “destination” Tiller Money spreadsheet. It is a great tool if you want to start over with your finances in a new spreadsheet (without losing data) or migrate from an older “feedbot” spreadsheet to a Tiller Money Feeds (add-on) spreadsheet.
Last month, we performed an extensive rebuild on this tool to improve the quality of the data migration and to provide a few new options:
- Rebuilt transaction-migration engine
- New sidebar options for Transaction migration
- “Other fields” checkbox allows custom user-created columns to migrate (Tiller Money’s
Notecolumn is included in “Other fields”) - Discrete option for transactions for unlinked accounts
- Discrete option for transactions without Transaction ID
- Discrete option for transaction splits
- New option to migrate missing columns to destination sheet
- “Other fields” checkbox allows custom user-created columns to migrate (Tiller Money’s
- Improved split-transaction migration analysis
- New sidebar options for Transaction migration
- Improved manual account migration (from Balance History sheet)
- Improved discrete account recognition
- Removed case sensitivity from header processing
Import CSV Line Items workflow improvements
Last month, we added two features to the popular Import CSV Line Items workflow.
Amazon business CSV importer
With help and encouragement from user @ellisar, we have added a long-request import ruleset for Amazon business order histories (currently USA only).
Option to exclude offsets/orders
The line-item import sidebar now offers an option to exclude “offsets”. Transaction offsets are an important part of line-item expansion that balance cashflow when rows are added by neutralizing matching credit card charges.
Offsets, however, are not applicable in workflows where a balance accrues via deposits and withdrawals (e.g. Paypal, Venmo, etc). The new option allows you to insert only the line item rows when the offsets will not match up to credit-card charges.
New “Prorate Remainder” option in the Transaction Splitter
Users @sadermine and @twilsonfam asked if the remainder of an imbalanced split could be prorated across the splits. The answer: yes!
This new feature is live in the Transactions Splitter. You will see a new prompt offering this resolution when your splits do not add up to the original line item amount.
Year-to-Date Comparison template improvement
The Year-to-Date Comparison template compares your year-to-date spending to your budget to date. I ran it in my personal sheet yesterday, the fourth of the month. My #1-ranked off-budget category was Salary which was strange since it is our most predictable category. The issue was that my May salary arrives mid-month. This timing issue dwarfed all other budgeting errors.
I added a new YTD Period dropdown to the template that offers options “Completed Months” or “Through Present Month”. Use the “Completed Months” selection to only show actuals through only complete months.
Please continue to let us know how we can improve the Tiller Labs experience!
Randy