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Comparing Quicken to Tiller Money: 12 Things You Need to Know

Curious how Tiller stacks up against Quicken? Here we share 10 things you need to know when comparing Quicken to Tiller.

If you use Quicken, you already believe in the importance of understanding your money.

That’s great. But are you getting all the insights and awareness into your personal finances you want or need? Perhaps you are looking to try a different, more flexible approach.

Tiller Money lets you manage your personal finances with fully customizable spreadsheets. We think this is the best way. A survey found 96% of the people who switch from a personal finance app to a spreadsheet are satisfied with using a spreadsheet and 92% are more aware of their spending habits.

Tiller Money doesn’t use just any spreadsheet. The Tiller Money Feeds add-on for Google Sheets automates your daily banking transactions and balances into a Google Sheet you own. The Tiller Money Feeds add-in for Microsoft Excel can also power up your Excel budget spreadsheet. If you need more inspiration on why you might want to use a spreadsheet for tracking and budgeting, check out this blog post.

Here we’ll explore which Quicken features are found in Tiller Money and which are not. Since Quicken has different features across its various versions and platforms, we’ll stick to Quicken’s major features. Unlike Quicken, Tiller Money is the same for everyone and works on both Windows and Mac and can be used from any platform or device that can access Google Sheets.

7 Quicken Features You’ll Find In Tiller Money

. Tracking Your Bank Transactions

Both Tiller Money and Quicken track all your financial transactions. In Quicken, you can view an Account Register with all the transactions for each account. In Tiller Money, all transactions for your connected accounts are listed on the Transactions sheet.

It’s easy to sort and filter Transactions to create your own customized views. For example, you can filter by a single account or category. Searching your transaction data is quick and easy. Using the Tiller Money Labs add-on you can quickly add the Account Filter sheet for viewing transactions for an individual account.

Tiller Money can bring your daily transactions and all your account balances right to your inbox every morning with a daily email summary.

Automated Budget Spreadsheet Quicken

#2. Securely and Automatically Import Your Bank Transactions

Quicken automatically imports your bank, credit card, and other financial transactions. So does Tiller Money. Both use 256-bit AES encryption for powerful data security. Tiller Money has no access to your bank credentials, and no ability to move any of your money.

No one at Tiller Money will see your private transaction or balance data, nor do we have access to your Google Sheet unless you specifically choose to share it with us. You own your Google Sheet or Excel workbook.

#3. Categories and Tags

Both Quicken and Tiller Money provide automated categorization features. AutoCat, a feature of the Tiller Money Feeds add-on allows you to quickly build a customized rule set to automatically categorize transactions. You’re no longer boxed in to the automated guesses offered by Quicken and you have full control over your categories.

Both make it easy to add and delete categories and subcategories. You can add a multiple tags to transactions in both as well. Tiller Money takes it a step further and lets you tag at the Category level too, for more detailed rollup reporting available in the Tiller Money Labs add-on.

Quicken lets you split a transaction into various categories. Using the Tiller Money Labs add-on you can easily split transactions in your Tiller Money powered Google Sheets too.

#4. Financial Reports and Budgeting

Quicken includes dozens of standard reports for your financial data. Tiller Money can match these reports, plus it gives you the ability to create any financial report you can imagine.

The Tiller Money Labs add-on allows you to add various solutions on top of the Foundation template, the recommended template for getting started. These pre-build Labs solutions are supported by the Tiller Money team in the vibrant Tiller Money Community, and provide in-depth reporting around weekly category spending, monthly budgeting, annual budgeting, cash flow analysis, debt snowball planning, and net worth tracking just to name a few. If you prefer to start from scratch, or have your own Google Sheets template, the Tiller Money Feeds add-on can power those with your banking transactions and balances too.

Monthly Budget Analysis Quicken

Both Quicken and Tiller Money give you several ways to watch your account balances and track your budget. In Quicken, you can only set up a budget the way the software allows.

With Tiller Money, you can track your budget any way you want

With Tiller Money, you can track your budget any way you want and even share your Google Sheets budget with your spouse, business partner, accountant, or treasurer.

#5. Auto Categorization

Quicken automatically categorizes your transactions. Sometimes it guesses correctly. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Tiller Money takes a different approach. With AutoCat you can automatically categorize transactions based on your unique ruleset, so it never guesses wrong.

However, we don’t force AutoCat on you out of the box. We believe there is some magic and awareness that happens when you categorize transactions manually. We don’t want to guess for you, and we can’t know the intent behind a purchase. This gives you the option of seeing each of your transactions to become more aware of your financial picture. By manually categorizing a transaction, you are acknowledging the transaction. This makes it easy to discover charges that shouldn’t be there and gives you the freedom to do it your way.

#6. Pending transactions and reconciliation

Some versions of Quicken offer the option to adding upcoming transactions and have them reconciled when they’re brought in automatically. Perhaps you want to enter a check that hasn’t cleared yet or a further purchase to see how it affects your cash flow.

With the Tiller Money Labs add-on you can manually add pending transactions and flag them for reconciliation too.

#7. Security

In Quicken, your financial data can be protected behind a password to unlock the application. Since Tiller Money runs on Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel, all your financial data is protected by your Google password or your computer or Office 365 password. Google places a high priority on accounts security and combined with their 2-Step Verification (which we highly recommend you activate) you get an added layer of powerful security.

4 Quicken Features You Won’t Find In Tiller Money

. How Transfers Are Handled

Quicken uses double-entry accounting principles. That means if you make a transfer from one account to another, Quicken will automatically place a corresponding transaction in the account where the transfer is being made. This system works as long as the transfer gets completed. Since transfers between banks and credit card companies usually take a few days, there might be a few days when a transfer is automatically listed in an account, but the actual transfer hasn’t yet taken place.

Tiller Money takes a different approach. For each account, transactions are downloaded and handled separately. Tiller Money won’t automatically create a transaction in one account due to a transfer in a different account, but if both accounts are connected to your spreadsheet both sides of the transfer will show up automatically. With Tiller Money, you can assign each of these transactions to the Transfer category. When all your transfers have been completed, the transfer category should have a balance of zero. A nice benefit of Tiller Money’s system is you can easily identify what transfers might not have been completed if your transfer balance is not zero.

#2. Detailed Investment Information

Quicken keeps detailed information about your investment portfolios. You can view information about each stock, bond or mutual fund you own. Quicken also generates capital gain reports and tracks cost basis information for your investments.

Tiller Money keeps track of the transactions in your investment accounts, such as purchases, sales, and dividend reinvestments, but, it doesn’t keep detailed records for each of your investments.

GoogleFinance

You can use Google Sheets to make your own portfolio and investment reports. Google can retrieve price, change, and dozens of other financial attributes by using the GOOGLEFINANCE function. Putting =GOOGLEFINANCE(“GOOG”,”price”) into a Google Sheets cell returns Alphabet’s (Google parent) current price. Using this function, you can build customized Portfolio views with Google Sheets. Learn more about using GOOGLEFINANCE to track your investment portfolio with Tiller Money on the Tiller Money Community.

#3. Bill Pay

Quicken offers the ability to pay your bills inside of the application.

Since Tiller Money has no access to your money, it doesn’t offer any way to pay your bills. Many banks offer free bill pay on their websites. When using your bank’s bill pay directly, there is less chance something can go wrong with a third-party payment provider.

#4. Annual Releases

Quicken releases new software most years, which require a paid update. Not all Quicken users have upgraded to the latest version, so they might be running older software. Usually, new features are not introduced until a new version ships.

Tiller Money uses the software-in-the-cloud model. There’s no software to install and you never have to buy or upgrade to a new version. Both Tiller Money and Google Sheets are constantly making improvements and adding features.

Give Tiller Money A Try

Now that you have a better idea of what you can and can’t do with Tiller Money, give it a try, free for 30 days. You can run both Quicken and Tiller Money at the same time to see which best fits your needs. Tiller Money’s friendly support team and enthusiastic community can answer your questions and help you make the switch.

Heather Phillips

Heather Phillips

Heather comes from a background of user experience design & customer support. She loves helping others learn, explore and discover better ways to use applications and products that improve their lives. When she’s not coaching customers on Tiller best practices, tweeting or writing blogs, she’s probably at a yoga class, out for a hike in the Blue Ridge, or off volunteering for a variety of non-profits.

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"There isn’t another tool on the market that does what Tiller can do.”
Will Hinton, Google Review October 30, 2023