Regain control of your financial transactions

Regain control of your financial transactions! Export all of them to a common spreadsheet with Tiller …

Some of the biggest financial software companies do whatever they can to lock you in to using their products.

I tried for a long time to get used to Quicken.

I started and restarted several times at the beginning of calendar years to use Quicken to track all of our finances, categorize them, budget, etc.

As is often said: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

I can't really blame Quicken for my failure to follow through with using their software.

After Intuit sold the software (and perhaps even a bit before) there were holes in the functionality for me — particularly the ability to pull in my TSP balance.

The bigger headache, though, was that all of the transaction data were locked into Quicken's proprietary database format. I could see the transactions on the screen, and report them out from within Quicken, but getting them all out to, say, and spreadsheet was all but impossible.

It was a bit like the Adobe Acrobat model. Everyone and their brother can read PDFs, but you have to buy their software to create them or edit them.

Table of Contents

Enter Tiller: Import all of your transactions to a spreadsheet

It's mainly for this reason — data portability — that I really like Tiller.

The “killer app” part of what Tiller does is pull in my transactions, balances, etc., from all of my accounts into a single Google Spreadsheet.

After linking my bank, credit card, mortgage, and investment accounts — all 29 of them — I run the process that brings in all of the transactions from all of those accounts that it can get its hands on.

The main spreadsheet, called the Tiller Foundation Template, has these tabs:

Insights tab

This tab has a net worth summary, as well as a few overall statistics of what the spreadsheet contains.

Also included in this tab is an update-able “top 10” quad chart with the ten biggest inflows, ten biggest outflows, and the most frequent transactions.

The Insights tab is a dashboard view of your financial activity.

Transactions tab

The Transactions tab contains all transactions for all accounts that you've set up Tiller to pull from, all neatly organized in a single spreadsheet.

This is the tab that I get the most use out of, and is the main reason I continue to use Tiller.

When it comes time to review the finances for the past month, I download the sheet, sort by account then by date, and print it out. (My wife and I find it easier to print this out; we're old-school that way.)

This makes checking the credit card statements and the checking accounts very easy. No juggling of multiple statements, and more importantly, no logging into several different websites to pull this information together.

A side benefit of this tab is that all of the accounts are there — even the ones that we don't reconcile every month. Pretty much everything we need to dive down into what happened financially across everything is right there.

Categories tab

The Categories tab has two purposes:

To define the categories and their grouping for the transactions and the budgeting;
To set the monthly budget for each category.

Editing, adding, and deleting categories on this tab updates the reporting for the rest of the tabs. (In other words, this tab drives the other ones with regard to categories and budget amounts.)

Adding another category is as easy as adding another row on this spreadsheet. The other tabs automatically show the new category.

Back on the Transactions tab, there is a column for Category. This is the place where you tell Tiller that this trip to Walmart was for Groceries, and this bill is for Internet.

Monthly Budget tab

The Monthly Budget tab is driven by the Categories and Transactions tabs.

As you enter the budgeted amounts for each category of income and spending and categorize the transactions, the Monthly Budget tab shows how much you've spent (or earned) in a particular category, and how much you have left for the month.

This gives you an overall picture of how the month is going with regard to your spending.

Yearly Budget tab

The Yearly Budget tab has, unsurprisingly, the rollup of the monthly budget information in a more compact format.

This tab allows you a view into your entire budgeted and actual cash flow for the calendar year.

Balances tab

While the budget tabs give you inflows and outflows, the Balances tab is a snapshot of where all of the accounts are right now.

This tab gives a summary of current balances for all assets and liabilities, and hence a number for net worth.

Tiller Money Labs: Extensions beyond the basics

The Tiller Foundation Template has all of the important stuff, right out of the box.

There's also an add-on available called Tiller Money Labs. This add-on has experimental, developmental functions, and gives added processing to the core pieces. It lets you make Tiller as easy or as involved as you want.

Additional functionality from Tiller Money Labs currently includes:

A spending comparison report
An available spending money tracker
A year-to-date comparison report
A report for weekly spending analysis by category
A category tracker report
An estimated quarterly taxes report (for self-employed people)
A yearly cash flow report
A yearly budget template (to supplement the core functionality)
A net worth template (with additional graphs and analysis)
A net worth snapshot
A small business dashboard template
A category roll-up report
An import CSV utility (more on this below)
A debt snowball spreadsheet
A profit and loss template
A holiday gift planner!

A bit more detail on the CSV import utility

The comma-separated value (CSV) import utility is one of the add-ons from Tiller Money Labs that I've used, so I'll explain how it helps us out.

We buy a fair bit from Amazon (as many other people do).

Reconciling credit card charges from Amazon with the purchases we made is a bit of work, though. The descriptions of the Amazon charges on our credit card statements don't really say what was purchased. Additionally, sometimes the amount of the charge isn't tied to a particular order.

Almost all the time, everything ends up working out, but it's a matching game between our credit card statements and our order history in our Amazon account to make sure.

Tiller breaks out our imported Amazon charges

To facilitate the matching game, we download the orders in CSV format from Amazon, and upload the CSV files to Tiller, and run the script.

Following this, we see additional lines on the Transactions tab that break out the credit card transactions into the individual items from that charge.

Problem solved!