This is more of a question for somebody on the tiller team like @heather@morgan@randy…
There’s a limit of 200 categories that one can have in Tiller. I was wondering if it’s documented anywhere all the reasons why that limitation exists? I’ve been looking through the foundation template and the only things I can see as to why that limit would exist is the manual formulas in the pink-ish cells in the hidden sections of the reports.
I’ve been making some upgrades recently to the Monthly Budget and Yearly Budget foundation reports, and have been able to transform those cell-by-cell formulas into arrays that automatically expand. I was thinking if these were the only limitations, I could offer the new reports for those who want more categories.
As far as I know, the Monthly/Yearly Budget templates aren’t built to support more than 200 custom groups/categories just because of those formulas you’ve found & made into arrays. We try to keep templates simple out of the box to support the average user and keep their dashboard performance high (with just a smaller dataset, less going on in the sheet, etc.), but then offer the option to expand those formulas for more power-users.
I personally don’t know of any other limitations but I’m not an expert on the template infrastructures.
I have about 225 Categories so I know what you’re referring to here. I just had to update some of the pages (had to extend some of the formulas lower). It just requires some investigating depending on the page that you’re on, but it’s not too difficult to update your sheets to accommodate much more than 200 categories.
Thank you! I’ve scoured the foundations template, and can’t really find any other reasons for the limitation to exist. I was more so concerned about the back-end code that I can’t actually inspect. Like if more than 200 categories exist, will they pop up in the dropdowns for split & manual transaction processes, will auto-cat be able to recognize them all, etc…
The report enhancements I’ve been making will not add much overhead to the sheets themselves, but will add a lot more value for the user. On top of replacing those cell-by-cell formulas with array formulas (which should actually be more performant and closer follow Tiller conventions), I’m adding a toggle cell to allow the user to switch between Category and Group view.
I’m also adding an option to hide rows that have a zero balance, as well as an option to scrub the sheet of unnecessary zero values. These two options are honestly game-changers for me. With them enabled, the report is far more focused, and your eyes are better led to the numbers that actually matter.
Early on, we set some thresholds to try to balance performance against typical user needs and settled on 100 accounts and 200 categories. You’ll see these thresholds throughout the template portfolio. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy way to change these thresholds globally… but the ranges can be updated on a template-by-template basis if higher numbers are needed… and if users are comfortable with the performance impacts (which are, quite honestly, hard to quantify).
