What is the Best Budget Spreadsheet?

After countless conversations with our customers and multiple design revisions, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of the new Tiller Budget spreadsheet template. It’s incredibly powerful and also simple to use. It gives you the flexibility to manage your budget in a way that makes sense to you and your financial situation.

Tiller Budget Spreadsheet Highlights

A new new category setup sheet called Categories

Many of you have asked for sub-categories. We wanted to answer that request, and we’ve upgraded our category schema to make it easier to organize your categories. Configure a type (income or expense) and group (create as many as you want) for each category. Our reports in this template cluster your categories by groups, giving you a leg up on organizing your data.

Custom budget time periods

Another popular request was for budget periods other than calendar month start and end. Now you can choose the time period that makes the most sense for your budget cycle. Set your budget time period to monthly, bi-monthly, weekly, quarterly, or any custom time period.

Robust Budget Dashboard

Get regular insights about your budget progress via the dashboard on your Budget sheet. The budget sheet is organized first by type, then group and finally by category. You can adjust your budget targets for each category on this dashboard and see the changes reflected right away. A progress bar for each category helps you visualize how much you’ve spent and how much planned budget is remaining. You’ll also see last period’s actuals for each category to compare your income and spending from month to month.

The right side panels on the dashboard give you quick insights. You’re reminded how many transactions are waiting for you to categorize on your Transactions sheet. You’re given some highlights about your planned and current cash flow. Finally, you can visualize how much of your expense budget is remaining for the current period.

Powerful Category Detail Reporting

In addition to an awesome budget tracker dashboard, we’ve included a powerful category detail report. The new report provides a transaction analysis of your spending across select categories for a chosen time period.

For example, you can see just how much money you spent on groceries last month and the specific transactions that are tied to that category. The category detail report is a great reference when you want to analyze months of spending data at the transaction detail level for planning out future budget scenarios or year-end taxes.

Better Balances

Last but not least, we’ve upgraded the balances sheet in this new budget spreadsheet so you have more control over your balances report. You’ll see your assets and liabilities grouped separately. You can manually add accounts to track the value of other assets and liabilities, such as the value of your home or car. Finally, you can assign a group to each of these accounts for another layer of organization in your balances view.

We’re here to help

We’re eager for more suggestions to improve this template (and our other templates too). The new budget template has a help section dedicated to making sure you have the info you need to be successful, but we’re always here to answer questions too. Try out the new template and let us know what you think!