Powerful Columns for Personal Finance
Just because they’re hidden to the far right on your Transactions tab doesn’t mean they’re not useful. Learn about four lesser-known columns that are populated with some helpful data for your money management.
Columns are integral to spreadsheets, right? We updated our standard template a while back to include some additional options for analyzing your spending and income. The Transactions tab includes four columns that might not be familiar. By default, they’re over on the far right side of your Transactions tab. In this post we provide a little background on those columns.
If you’re new to Tiller you might find our Transactions Tab Basics blog post useful as well as the Power Up Your Money Management Worksheet with Additional Transaction Details post, where we share more information on columns. You can always rearrange columns by hovering over the column header until you see the “hand symbol” and then click and drag the column to a new spot.
The Month Column
Month data is now populated by default when you create a new sheet using our standard template. Tiller populates this column with the date that corresponds to the first day of the month when the transaction occurred. This is useful when you want to create monthly spending or income reports, such a pivot tables. We even have a handy blog post on creating a monthly spending pivot table.
It’s also great if you need to filter through transactions to show all the transactions for a given month.
The Week Column
Similar to the Month column, the Week column allows you to build custom spending reports on a week-by-week basis. The Week column shows the date for the Sunday prior to a given transaction. So a purchase on Monday, September 12 would show 9/12/16 in the Date column and 9/11/16 in the Week column.
The Week column is great if you want to build a weekly spending budget. You can use the same steps for the monthly spending pivot to create a weekly spending pivot (except use the week column instead of the month column, of course).
Transaction ID
The Transaction ID column ties back to our Tiller database. If there’s ever an issue with the data in your Google Sheet, the Transaction ID may be helpful in diagnosing or resolving it. This column, like all columns, is optional. We recommend including it in your sheet to help with troubleshooting should that ever be necessary.
Date Added
The Date Added column shows when a transaction entered your Transactions tab. After you swipe your card, a transaction can take a day or more to clear with the bank. Tiller only loads cleared transactions into your Tiller Sheet, so there is usually a difference between the date that’s in the “Date” column and the “Date Added” column.
What if I don’t see these columns in my template?
If you’re using an earlier version of the standard template, or if you removed some columns, you might find these are missing. You can always remove or add columns to your sheet. To add the “Month” column, for example, if it doesn’t exist already, just type Month in the first row of an empty column. The feedbot will recognize that column and fill in month data for each new transaction (but the feed bot will not go back and add new data to existing transactions).
Have you used any of the above columns in your custom reports? Let us know via the live chat tool on our website.
