A Look at Tiller Money
With the exit of the Mint online budgeting app at the end of 2023, we have been asked by clients what other options are available. In this week’s newsletter, I want to share my experience using Tiller Money to track and manage my personal finances.
I started using Tiller Money back in 2018. My firm was looking for a way to help clients figure out where their money was going, so we could do more accurate retirement projections. I was attracted to this tool because it worked with spreadsheets, and once created, a Tiller sheet can be shared with other family members, or even one’s financial planner, to be viewed or edited. It also allows a ton of customization and flexibility and has filtering and reporting capabilities.
Tiller makes managing money in a spreadsheet fast and easy by automating your daily transactions and balances into your own private Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel.
Tiller provides spreadsheet templates for individuals (and businesses) to track their spending, debt, net worth, savings, budgets, and other customizable spreadsheets to manage their finances. A Tiller membership allows its users to choose up to five templates to use simultaneously. Each template can have different linked accounts, so members could use Tiller to create spreadsheets for both their business and personal cash flows in a single login (but feeding to separate spreadsheets). I’ve also recently learned that I can choose my favorite fonts and colors to customize my sheet even further.
You securely connect all your accounts (checking and savings accounts, credit cards, loans, investment accounts, etc.) to Tiller via their financial data provider, Yodlee. Yodlee supports data feeds for more than 20,000 financial institutions, and you can click the link to see if your bank is supported. Please see Tiller’s 12-Point Security and Privacy Promise for more information about how Tiller protects your privacy and security. Tiller data is protected with 256-bit AES encryption, the industry standard. In addition, Tiller is blind to your financial data and never mines or sells your information. There are no ads or selling of data to third parties.
When you sign up, Tiller automatically grabs the past 90 days of transactions and adds them to your spreadsheet. You can manually download the older transactions, then format and import them into their Tiller sheet so you can have a full year’s worth of data to look back on and analyze.
A nice feature of Tiller is that you can create your own cash flow categories and groupings of those categories. This category list lives in one of your Tiller sheets’ tabs and then you can manually categorize transactions with a drop-down menu or use the plug-in option to categorize automatically using your user-defined rules. Once categorized, the data flows into your selected template summary page.
You can opt into a daily email summary to get your daily balances and transactions delivered right to your inbox. This helps you stay on top of what’s coming and going in your accounts and reminds you gently to log into your Tiller sheet to make sure your transactions are categorized.
My favorite thing of all is that Tiller has great customer service. Ask your question and you usually get an answer within a day from a US Based Tiller customer service person. They also have a robust online community where you can post questions to interact with other Tiller users or search for how to do something. They have lots of articles and videos to support you in the setup and use of their templates. There is a learning curve with Tiller, but once you get the hang of it, it’s a great tool.
Tiller Money offers a Free 30-day trial so if you love using spreadsheets and are looking for a new cash flow tracking app, please take it for a spin and see for yourself how awesome it is. After 30 days, Tiller is just $79 per year on an annually renewable subscription. I hope you love it as much as I do.
For more information about Mint closing and other budgeting apps, please consider viewing the following:
- MainStreet Financial Advisor, Katherine Edwards, recently wrote an article, 3 Alternatives to the Mint Budgeting App, which provides an overview of some of our favorite alternatives.
- Join the conversation this month with MainStreet Financial Advisor and Owner, Anna Sergunina, who will be presenting this month’s Chalk Talk on the closing down of Mint and things to prepare for. Click here for more information. Current clients can join for free. Guests are only $10.
- Read Tiller’s article, Compare Tiller to Mint, for a summary of how Tiller compares to Mint.
