Using Tags With Your Tiller-Powered Spreadsheets

Like other personal finance services, Tiller uses transaction categories as the basis of organizing your financial data. 

But we also empower you with additional tools for organizing your data, your way. 

These include groups and optional tags, which work together with categories to give you ultimate control of how you organize, analyze, and visualize your financial data.

Let’s take a look at how they work below.

Transaction Categories

Transaction categories are the basic framework you’ll use to classify your income and expense transactions into specific areas. 

When you create a spreadsheet with Tiller, we’ll include a sample list of categories to get you started, but you’re free to rename, delete, or add more categories to the list. In other words, your transaction categories are entirely customizable. 

Set up the perfect category list for you, your family, and/or your business. Finally, your categories can reflect the way you think about your money.

Read: 4 Tips for Choosing Your Budget Categories

Transaction Groups

In addition to categories, transaction groups give you a higher level of organization to better understand your income and spending.

The way you group your transaction categories is up to you. 

If your categories are pretty specific, one option would be using more broad topical groups to give you more broad insight into your spending. For example, if you have transaction categories for Groceries, Restaurants, and Coffee, those might all fit into a Food transaction group.

Another option would be to use a simple transaction group structure to organize your transactions. You could just use a couple of transaction groups like Needs vs Wants or Discretionary vs Non-Discretionary.

Tags

Beyond transaction categories and groups, tags are another powerful organizing tool. Get a quick way to view transactions across multiple categories by assigning a tag to individual transactions or even entire categories.

For example, you might use a tag to view the entire cost of your recent vacation (lodging, food, travel costs, events, etc.), even though the transactions are categorized using the same categories you use for your day-to-day living expenses too. 

Or tag your subscriptions so you can run a quick report and see how much you’re spending every month and year.

You can even tag any tax-deductible transactions and speed up tax prep at the end of the year.

https://community.tillerhq.com/t/docs-tags-report-for-transaction-tagging/375

Accessing transaction tags in Microsoft Excel

Insert a new column named Tags into the Transactions tab. 

When you find a transaction you’d like to tag, manually type the name of the tag into the Tag column. You can assign multiple tags to the same transaction by separating the tags with a comma and without a space (e.g. Tax,Business)

How to access transaction tags in Tiller-powered Google Sheets

Insert a new column named Tags into your Transactions sheet.

When you find a transaction you’d like to tag, manually type the name of the tag into the Tag column. You can assign multiple tags to the same transaction by separating the tags with a comma and without a space (e.g. Tax,Business)

Automate transaction tagging with Autocat

Use AutoCat for Google Sheets or Excel to automate tagging based on a transaction description. 

With advanced rules, set up a column override that will automatically add a tag to your Tags column based on the specific transaction criteria you set up (e.g., Any transaction with the Delta.com in its description will be tagged Travel).

• Learn how to set up a column override for automated transaction tagging using AutoCat for Excel
• Learn how to set up a column override for automated transaction tagging using AutoCat for Google Sheets

Assigning a tag to a category

Using tags at the category level offers another level of data organization. Rather than assigning a tag to individual transactions, you can quickly apply the same tag based on the assigned category.

• Read: Learn more about tagging categories in the Tiller Community.

Go farther with tags using Tiller Community Solutions

The Tiller Community Solutions add-on for Google Sheets showcases templates and solutions built by Tiller Community members that demonstrate what’s possible with Tiller. 

Here are a few favorite reports and workflows from Tiller Community Solutions to make tagging a more powerful feature in your spreadsheet.

With the Tags Report For Tiller Spreadsheets, generate a report with a custom date range to show the sum amount for transactions using a specific tag.

With the Estimated Quarterly Tax Spreadsheet for Tiller, view tagged business transactions and track itemized deductions tagged in your spreadsheet.

Or use the Tag Manager to

Using Tags To Track Shared Expenses In Google Sheets

Tracking shared expenses in Google Sheets is simple. Depending on your category and group setup, apply a Shared tag to individual transactions or entire categories.

Then use the Tiller Community Solutions add-on for Google Sheets, run a Tags report with custom date range to review all transactions associated with your Shared tag and get summary totals organized by category.