Tiller’s Focus Heading Into 2024, Plus a Quick Look Back
The past year was Tiller’s biggest yet as we grew to new heights with our customers, community, and team.
Along the way, we experienced the unexpected demise of Mint.
We’ve been through something like this before. When Microsoft partnered with Tiller in 2022 and announced the end of Money in Excel, we similarly welcomed a surge of new subscribers and members of the Tiller community.
And like then, we’re learning from these new customers – what they love about Tiller and what we want to reinforce for our future.
Longevity
When a service you’ve used for years goes away, you can’t help but question the longevity of its replacement.
Tiller has always been about building a solution you’ll never outgrow. And our integration with Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets ensures you always own your financial data in your private spreadsheets. You never have to worry about exporting anything if Tiller vanished.
But more importantly, we’re not vanishing! We’re leaning into a bright future of growth and possibility.
Our decision not to raise venture capital has further empowered us to own our future.
Every venture-funded personal finance competitor of any duration has either closed or been acquired. Many of those acquired then later closed.
Even Mint started as a venture-funded company. But we are following a model that gives us freedom to build Tiller in the ways we feel best support Tiller and our customers long-term, not the accelerated timelines of institutional investors. This is increasingly important to Tiller but also to each of you, our customers,
Community
It was exciting to see (and use) all the new Tiller Community Solutions in 2023. We are in awe of how you use Tiller. We want to spotlight more of your innovations and ideas by continuing to foster a bright Community where you can learn and share.
Privacy
Tiller has always prioritized your privacy. Since we began, we built processes to ensure Tiller’s team doesn’t see customer transactions and balances unless you decide to share your data or spreadsheet with us.
We have negotiated terms with our aggregator to ensure they are not mining or aggregating customer data. Our revenue comes from your subscription fees, period.
The surge of customers in 2023 has underscored the importance of each of these areas.
Tiller’s Priorities for 2024
You value longevity, community, and privacy. And so do we.
On the product, our team is moving ambitiously on a few near-term priorities.
Beyond our core aggregator partner, we’ve recently added two new bank data aggregators into our dev system and we’ll be working on a third shortly.
This deep research into new aggregators is helping us select the best new aggregator that will extend our bank coverage and reduce the probability that anyone can’t connect to one of their banks.
We’re also rebuilding our Tiller Money Feeds for Google Sheets to be faster, better, and more intuitive.
We will be borrowing some of the lessons learned from our newer Tiller Money Feeds for Microsoft Excel. This will be a significant and noticeable lift for our Google Sheets user experience.
We are also experimenting with LLMs and AI workflows. We’re exploring how AI can help you better understand your money in a way that works best for you. This includes how to best leverage the native AI workflows emerging in both Google Sheets and Excel.
We’re also continuing to grow our team. Our latest senior engineer started work this week, we are growing our customer success team, and a growing team through 2024 will also empower our ability to help you.
Here’s to a bright, productive, and prosperous 2024 ahead!
The one omission from Tiller’s priorities for 2024 is any mention of support for tracking investments. My husband and I love Tiller, and are building our financial tracking systems around it. If we could just get number of shares, price per shares, and ticker symbol with each transaction, it would open up a lot of possibilities.
Glad to hear youmare focusing on bank integrators for 2024. Waiting patiently to get more accounts set up and working.
Can’t help you with tracking shares but you can automate price per share and ticker symbol right now using functions in Google or Excel. With Excel, you can pull in all kinds of data on stocks, fund, ETFs by using the Data>Data Type menu. Its very easy to use. Somewhere around 30 different data points you can pull in for a fund using Excel, automatically. All you would have to do is put your share counts in for each fund.
Here is how you do it with Google. It’s not as easy to use as Excel and is all function driven:
I am very familiar with the GOOGLEFINANCE function. The trouble is that I don’t know the exact number of shares. I have built out functions that infer up the ticker symbol from the transaction description, based on a table of regular expressions, and another function that looks up whether the transaction is Buy, Sell, Deposit, Withdraw or Dividend, again, based on another table of regular expressions. Suppose I have a transaction where I bought $1000 dollars of a given stock. Because I don’t know the exact time of day that the transaction occurred, I don’t know the exact share price, and thus I can’t calculate the number of shares that I purchased from my Tiller feed. Right now, the workaround is to download a CSV file of transactions directly from Fidelity and import that into Google Sheets, but it would be nice to have something more automated than that.
multi-aggregator + refreshed add-on!
