I would like to unlink a couple of my accounts that I just want periodic balance updates for and then manually update moving forward. What is the best way to do this and keep the record seamless moving forward when it is unlinked and manually updated?
You’d want to first create the manual account in your spreadsheet.
Assuming you’re using Google Sheets, you can do this with the Tiller Money Feeds add-on > Manual accounts.
If you’re using Microsoft Excel you’d want to first manually add the account to the Balance History sheet by inserting a row and filling in the columns and being sure to use an Account ID that starts with manual: so when we release this feature for Excel it’ll pick up your manual entries there too.
Then you’d want to follow the steps in the guide below on how to clean up duplicated accounts, specifically the steps for cleaning up the Balance History sheet, in your spreadsheet and be sure to use the manual Account ID that the add-on creates for all your historical entries. Then it will appear as a single account and all the “history” will be associated with the manual account.
Don’t forget to unlink the account from the sheet so you don’t get future entries automated into the sheet.
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Wouldn’t it be better to just uncheck the account from the spreadsheet and then just insert a new row into Balance History with the account? In this case, you will add the balance “manually” for a linked account that is CURRENTLY not being linked. In the future, if he decides to relink with balances/transactions, all he has to do is go to “Connected Accounts” in sheets and checkbox and it should still come in without any fuss.
@yossiea you could do it that way for sure, the only draw back is every time you want to update the balance you’d need to go and insert a new row in Balance History and update the date, amount, month, and week.
The advantage of the method I suggested is that you can make the updates in the UI and it inserts the row for you. Less likely to damage the Balance History sheet that way. I’ve seen people mangle it trying to insert rows manually.
Hi @heather - I see this post is now 3 years old. Given all the recent changes and the csv import feature, is this still the best way to convert an account that is managed by tiller to a manual account? I have a couple of accounts with credit unions that have recently implemented MFA and it’s not playing nicely with tiller, so I’m trying to find a way to convert to manual while keeping my transaction and balance history unchanged in tiller…
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@arpanandneil yes, we don’t currently offer an automated way to de-duplicate/merge accounts if you want to stop the automated feed and start tracking manually.
The CSV Import workflow helps with the management of data input but you’d still need to follow the steps in that guide to de-duplicate the accounts in your spreadsheet so you don’t have two instances of the account showing on the Balances sheet.
Automating this is something we’re exploring for the future.
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Hi @heather - I’m still very confused.
I want to take two existing accounts that used to be managed by Tiller and convert them to being entirely manually managed accounts, while retaining my transaction history and category allocations for each transaction.
Can you explain how to do this step-by-step? Here’s my current understanding - you can let me know where I’m missing a step…
- Create a new manual account using Tiller Money Feeds; set the balance to today’s actual balance
- In the Tiller Console, remove the older Tiller-managed account.
- In the Balance History tab, change the Account ID of every row that referred to the old account ID and update it with the new ID of the manually created account
But then now how do I hold onto the old transactions from the Tiller-managed account and make sure they are now linked to the new Manual account?
Thanks!
There is a hidden Account ID column “M in my Transaction tab, yours may be different” in the Transaction Tab. You would update the values in this column the same way as the Account ID column in the hidden Balance History tab.
Thanks for all your guidance so far. Is it not possible to simply tell Tiller to no longer manage the account but keep everything as is? And then I could just use your new CSV import tool to pull in new transactions and manually update the balances using the manual balance update process?
Yes, you can do that too. You will have two sets of transactions; one set for your current transactions and another for the manually loaded transactions. This is because they will have different Account ID’s. But, this is not an issue as long as you don’t mind seeing both in your reports. You can finish out the year this way and then your 2026 transactions will all be the same with the manual process.