Yesterday evening our engineering team pushed some changes to Tiller Money Feeds for Google Sheets (and only Google Sheets) that we hoped would address a few ongoing issues we’ve seen customers reporting.
If you were using a Google Sheet that was previously linked to another Tiller user (e.g. you switched to a new Tiller account to change your email and brought your old sheet over with you) that sheet was no longer able to fill. This change should address that issue, and means that a sheet can only be linked to one user at a time.
The system by which we track what data has been filled (“watermarks”) was susceptible to a Google Sheets bug (nothing we could fix or change) so we’ve transitioned the location of where those watermarks are saved. The new watermark storage location is in a hidden spreadsheet in your Google Sheet so when you review your hidden sheets you’ll see a “Tiller.HiddenMetadata” sheet. It’s very important that you do not delete or edit this sheet.
In order to more slowly roll out these changes, since any changes related to watermarks are sensitive, we have paused Auto Fill for all Google Sheets.
You can fill your latest transactions and resume your Auto Fill simply by launching the Tiller Money Feeds add-on in your Google Sheet using the steps below:
Open your Google Sheet
Open the Extensions menu at the top
Choose Tiller Money Feeds > Launch (sign in if necessary)
This is also the point at which your watermarks will be migrated and your sheet will get the updated Tiller.HiddenMetadata sheet.
Once we have deemed the rollout was successful we’ll resume Auto Fill for all users.
Due to the nature of how our product works with spreadsheet linking, sharing sheets, and filling data from many accounts, plus past unlinking/relinking there are likely some edge cases we were not able to test that may introduce duplicate transactions into your spreadsheet or cause other weird behavior.
If you notice any weird behavior with Tiller Money Feeds related to the fill for Google Sheets or find duplicate transactions in your spreadsheet please reach out via the chat tool on the Tiller Console at https://my.tiller.com (not this community thread, please) to let us know.
Hi @bltcfo I took a quick peak at your account in our admin tooling. It does look like you’re running into an edge case here. I recommend these steps, but aren’t sure if they’ll work 100%.
Close your Google sheet.
Visit your Tiller Console at https://my.tiller.com you’ll see that there is a second instance of the same sheet linked to the Console. You should be able to click on the sheet name to expand and see the date it was linked.
Find the one that says it was linked 12/11/2021 and unlink it - click the “Unlink this sheet” button at the bottom of the list of accounts in the expanded sheet area.
Open the other already linked instance and launch Tiller Money Feeds and see if it’s still prompting you to re-connect accounts.
If so, please write into the support chat so we can troubleshoot there.
Hi Heather - support chat does not seem to be working. The connection issue below seems to be solved, although it takes forever to update. Also, I am getting duplicate transactions now. Thoughts?
That is correct @dsper231, Excel is not affected by this as it is only an update to Google Sheets.
Excel has been using a hidden metadata sheet for many many years already. Excel has a concept of a “very hidden” sheet so most users don’t even know it exists. Google doesn’t have a concept of “very hidden”
Also, an update here. We’ve heard some reports of some customers seeing a duplicate copy of their spreadsheet show up as linked on their Tiller Console and then when opening the add-on doesn’t recognize it’s already linked, prompts to re-link accounts, and then fills duplicates. It’s unclear why this has happened and we didn’t even know it was possible for the same sheet to get duplicated/linked like that. It’s affecting a very small portion of customers (less than 1%). Those who are affected won’t be able to use the sidebar for the time being until we can straighten that out. If you find that you’re seeing this message:
You can try visiting your Console to see if you see the duplicate linked sheet and try to unlink it, and if so that would allow you to use the sidebar, but I think the sidebar is blocking the step that makes the duplicate linked sheet even show up until we can push a fix for that.
We’re also seeing some cases where the migration is failing partway through. The hidden metadata sheet shows up, but remains empty, and doesn’t get hidden (stays visible) and the fill doesn’t complete. We’re still investigating this issue to determine the cause.
My guess is that it has something to do with the volume of data or number of tabs in the spreadsheet, but that’s a totally wild guess, and our engineering team is still investigating.
We appreciate your patience! We know these types of changes can be disruptive, but will make our service more robust and stable in the long run!
I do have 2 ‘foundation templates’ from a previous issue when switching to yodlee. I have tried activating accounts for 1 then the other and duplicates still come through.
@rhino201 and others if you see this “fill error” and/or the tiller.hiddenmetadata sheet shows up unhidden and blank
We recommend the following steps:
Open the Tiller Money Feeds add-on and turn off Auto Fill from the Settings menu (four lines bottom right of add-on or go straight to settings from the Extensions > Tiller Money Feeds menu at the top of your Google Sheet.
Restore your workbook to a version from June 4th (the date is important here). From the File menu > Version History.
Make a copy of your spreadsheet (from the File menu) and put “Backup” in the name when making the copy.
In the original, remove any tabs in your spreadsheet that don’t have inputted data (e.g. inputted data might be on Accounts sheet, Debt Payoff, Retirement Planner, etc) or are hard to re-create/can’t be re-installed with Tiller Money Feeds/Tiller Community Solutions. Most tabs, like Monthly Budget, Yearly Budget, etc are visualization only sheets and are safe to temporarily remove.
Once you’ve removed extraneous tabs, try launching the Tiller Money Feeds add-on and fill your spreadsheet.
If it successfully fills (no errors) and you can find the tiller.hiddenmetadata sheet hidden with content in the rows, then you should be good to re-add visualization sheets and turn the Auto Fill back on.
We’re really sorry for this inconvenience, but there is just a known, but unquantifiable, limitation with Google Sheets and large/complex spreadsheets that we’re trying to figure out how to deal with through this migration. We don’t have a specific solution just yet so these are the fastest steps to get you back on track.
For @anthony.s - agreed we don’t like customers encountering these issues either, but this duplicated sheets situation was not one we could have even imagined might happen.
If you have two instances of the same sheet linked on the Console and are seeing duplicate transactions in your spreadsheet here are the steps you should follow. To be clear, the duplicate sheet link is only a true duplicate sheet link issue if you click “open” for both instances and they have the exact same URL in the URL bar at the top. I’m noting this because some users link multiple copies of the Foundation Template and they’re just called “Tiller Foundation Template” on the Console, so while they look like the same sheet by name, they are actually different sheets by ID (in the URL).
Restore your Google Sheet to a version from June 4th (date is important here) - you can do this for either linked instance since they’re the exact same sheet.
Click the name of your spreadsheet to expand the details for the duplicate links.
Find the copy with the more recent linked date. You can find the linked date near the top of the spreadsheet section after you click the name to expand.
Scroll down near the bottom of that section below the accounts list for the sheet and click “unlink this sheet”
Open the other copy of the sheet and launch Tiller Money Feeds and try to fill. This should correct the duplicates issue.
when updating my sheet, it seems like tiller is stuck in an endless loop creating many duplicate entries for various accounts and transactions. Over 63k new lines
I wanted to let you know my google sheet has not updated since June 10th. I did follow your instructions and after launch I get the following “Start up Failed
Oops! Something went wrong. Use button below to try again.
I have the same problem. And since the old google sheet didn’t work (can’t start, can’t update, only got error messages), I created a new one. But after setting up categories and autocate, I kept getting “startup failed” message as well. Also for this new sheet, I did manually deleted transactions prior to 2024 as it automatically generated transactions since 2021/2020.
We are hearing some reports of issues with seeing a “Startup failed” message that have something to do with a browser extension and its settings that is unrelated to this push made to Tiller Money Feeds, likely due to recent Chrome browser updates, and is probably why incognito works for some.
If you’re running into that issue we recommend reaching out to our support team via chat on the Tiller Console at https://my.tiller.com as the team will have the list of items to double check and get things working, but TL;DR just disable all your browser extensions and then see if it will launch properly. If it does, then enable them one at a time to figure out which one is causing the problem.
