Was there a money moment that made you say ‘enough is enough’?
For me, I had used Quicken and Mint and dabbled with a few other apps, and was frustrated by all of them not being flexible enough to show me what I wanted to see the way I wanted to see it. With Tiller, I was able to immediately modify the Foundation templates and other supporting templates to look the way I wanted, and if they didn’t show the info I wanted, I was able to modify them, or build my own to get exactly what I was looking for.
Before deciding to try Tiller, I used spreadsheets and Mint. Then my personal situation changed, and I needed to have a better handle on my finances, so I decided to go ahead and give Tiller a try when I found out Mint was shutting down. I kick myself for not trying it when I first saw it; the customization and community make Tiller the best option for my needs.
My Tiller money moment was more out of necessity (and a call to action by my financial planner) more so than enough is enough. Here’s my Tiller story…
I started using Quicken in the early '90s and continued to use it for years. Yes, it was cumbersome to enter all transactions manually, but it was likely the best financial software aimed at individuals. Eventually, life became busy with kids, etc. and was fortunate to not have to adhere to a strict budget and was comfortably contributing to our 401k and 403b as well as mutual funds, bonds, etc.
Fast forward to the time to start seriously thinking about a retirement date, but still didn’t think I needed any financial software since my financial planner “had a plan” for us. She assured us we were “on track”. Fast forward again and now we’re a year away from retirement when she told us both that we need to create a household budget and track everything at least a year before retiring. She would use this information to continue to hone our retirement plan.
I procrastinated but finally started to look at what financial software was available, thinking that Quicken may not be the best anymore. Tiller came up in my research and it sounded perfect for me. As a software engineer, I never liked being constrained by what others developed and I was very familiar with both Excel and Google Sheets. I started with the free trial and instantly became hooked.
I’m now 5 years retired and I open up Tiller daily. I think I’ve downloaded and tried every Foundation and Community template. Several have been deleted as they weren’t a fit for me, many I’ve kept/use, and several of those I have customized to meet my particular needs.
I was tracking things manually in excel using my bank account. Even wrote some VBA to help tie out the balance. I had been thinking about making a cube (SSAS) out of my manual bank statement since I have a background in SQL server and MDX/DAX expressions. After doing it in a home lab I automated the process with updates to my spreadsheet using Powershell. When I mentioned it in passing to Gemini, it actually recommended I try Tiller to help automate the process even more. Long story short after mulling it over I saw that Tiller was offering a thirty day free trial. I signed up. I also tried Monarch’s free trial. After studying things a bit in my free time I built a tabular model DAX-powered Vertipaq database within PowerBI out of Tiller’s Foundation Template. It had more to offer than Monarch’s CSV download and could easily be ported into the model. I dropped Monarch for Tiller and haven’t looked back.
It was the automated pull and categorization. For better or worse i think even a year or two after my excel formatting was better for what i needed as sheets and excel had different formulations, and the initial setup took x3 as long as normal as historical only went back 90 days. But after a couple years and the community that has built out the service and custom solutions it has became such a time saver comparatively. The irony is with all the initial setup i had to do, if i ever had to redo i probably wouldn’t remember half of it. IE there’s a script running that converts that all caps to proper casing; but i can’t find where that original guide came from.
Initially, i think it was promoted more as a budgeting tool, but the abilities then wasn’t really what i needed. but it has became now more of a financial data aggregate tool.
Oh and a huge shutout to Heather and the customer service team as they were so nice and willing issues along.
Delving into the holdings part now, would be nice if a full regex could be implement into Auto-cat, but one step at a time.
For me, it was when Excel informed us they were ending their provided money management and referred users to Tiller.
We were using Mint to track our expenses in the runup to retirement. A couple years ago I found Tiller and it does much more than I was able to do with Mint, and the ability to add my own sheets to a Google Sheets doc was the clincher. Now we use to to make sure our spending is within our budget.
So much complexity and inflexibility with QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise and yet still cumbersome to download all data and put together financial reports we need, with lots of cash basis accounting software functions rendered obsolete by being provided by outside vendors (eg accounts receivable by payment processors, purchase orders by shopping platforms, etc), multiuser data entry access to Tiller provided by OneDrive, and multi-entity capabilities provided by just adding columns to Tiller Foundation, reporting capabilities not only built into Excel but easily augmented by third party add-ins, and hackers making use of in-house servers non-viable, costs of other accounting software alternatives exponentially higher and increasing, also knowing I could transition over the course of a year or so - all of that was when I knew it was time to make the jump to Tiller.
I’ve been using spreadsheets to track my fiances since 2003, when I was about to move and realized I was probably going to loose a bill somewhere in that process. I used Mint to supplement budgeting for awhile, but the “don’t loose any bills and know you’ll have enough to cover future expenses” part my spreadsheet did for me just wasn’t a common feature of available software. We were doing fine when we decided to stretch the budget for a big family event, and then found a major structural issue in our house that needs fixing. So pretty much it was money anxiety that sent me looking for live transaction updates and balances, but the history with spreadsheets that made me choose Tiller.
Was a Quicken user for 15+ years and it simply got so bloated with so much lag it became unusable. I would have to sit and wait for screen clicks to process. And the investment piece of it was buggy as hell which also makes me appreciate why Tiller has not pursued that side yet. Quicken’s Investment tracking was highly complex with all of the gaps and bugs that comes with that.
I had been researching options for a few years before I switched. I liked the spreadsheet aspect of Tiller because it lets you tinker more. I actually don’t mess with it lately nearly as much as I did in year one, but I’m in it every day.