How to Use Tiller to Organize Your Finances for Tax Time

With Tiller, your bank information is gathered throughout the year, making the necessary data for tax filing easily accessible.

Here are a few Google Sheets workflows for using Tiller to help prepare for tax time for both personal and/or self-employment income.

We put together this quick demo video of the different options for getting your tax information organized. You can also read more about these options below the video.

If you need to get all of your historical data from last year into your Google Sheets you can follow along with these steps.

Personal Taxes

Tiller offers a few workflows for helping you prepare for your personal tax filing. 

The #1 thing you can do to make your taxes easy for is to get your data into a spreadsheet. All your transactions in one place.

Detailed itemized deduction reporting 

If you prefer to use an itemized deduction amount on your tax return vs the standard deduction you can use the Category Rollup report to get a detailed analysis for your tax-deductible spending. If you’re not sure if you should itemize, consult with an accountant or tax advisor.

You can easily export or print the report to send to your accountant. 

1. Tag your tax-deductible categories as “Tax” on the Categories sheet.
2. Run the Category Rollup report and choose the “Tax” category in the Tag filter configuration option.

Learn more in the Tiller Community

Visualize your yearly category total spend

Pivot tables are an easy way to get your total spending for all categories. You can easily filter the pivot table to show you only what you need to see for your tax preparation and easily share with your accountant. 

A category pivot table by year is really simple with Google Sheets. 

Learn more in the Tiller Community

Watch the video below to see the Category Rollup report and Yearly Spending Pivot table demo. (Skip ahead to minute 11:49 if you already have all your past year’s data in your sheet and categorized).

Self Employed & Small Business Taxes

Tiller also offers workflows for helping you keep track of your tax-related small business expenses and business-related itemized deduction expenses.

Itemized Deduction Reporting

You can use the same Category Rollup report for itemized deduction reporting as documented in the “Personal Taxes” section above. 

Learn more in the Tiller Community

Estimated Quarterly Taxes

If you’re a sole proprietor, freelancer, or consultant with a simply structured business, Tiller can also help you estimate your quarterly taxes with the Estimated Quarterly Tax sheet. Your estimated quarterly taxes will be based on real-time spending data as it flows into your Transactions sheet, plus any manual adjustments you include. You can also use it to project your estimated taxes for each quarter.

Results are most accurate for individuals filing single that are self-employed with a business set up as a sole proprietor or a single member LLC that does not file as an S-corp where self-employment is the only source of income.

Get started in 3 easy steps:

1. Tag your business expense categories as “Business”
2. Add the Est Quarterly Tax sheet into any existing Tiller spreadsheet using the Tiller add-on
3. Configure the sheet for your specific tax situation.

Please note: Access to the Estimated Quarterly Tax sheet is provided as a convenience to help you estimate your state and federal quarterly taxes for the tax year indicated. Its use for any other purpose, including the calculation and preparation of income tax forms for filing with the IRS, is beyond the scope of this tool. Tiller makes no guarantee in regard to the accuracy of the calculations, tax rates or results. Consult a tax advisor or accountant to validate the accuracy of the results. 

Recommendations for keeping your finances organized for tax season

Keep business and personal separate 

We recommend that you use separate accounts for business and personal spending. When your business transactions are co-mingled with your personal transactions it’s more challenging to keep the data organized. 

Organize categories clearly

If you do have mixed personal and business transactions using categories intentionally can help you stay organized. Even if you don’t mix them it’s a good idea to have a strong category structure to make things easier. 

For example, if you use the same debit card to pay for parking for both business and personal trips, you probably want a separate “business – parking” category so you can tag that one as “business” and make sure that the personal parking doesn’t get mixed in. 

Webinar Recording

Covered in the webinar

• Getting last year’s transaction data manually into your sheet (if it’s not already there)
• Basics of AutoCat to help you make sure your transaction data is categorized
• Create a quick pivot table to sum up numbers for the year
• Explore community built tools and workflows to speed things up

Resources

• How to manually import your bank data
• Manually calculate month data for transactions
• How to use AutoCat
• How to build a yearly pivot table
• Filtering and sorting transactions
• Installing the Tiller Community Solutions add-on
• Adding the Tag column to the Categories sheet
• Using the Category Rollup Report
• Creating a P&L report
• Basic Bank CSV Import

Demo sheet

Right-click any tab and choose “copy to” to get a tab into your own Google Sheet. The Rule Builder one is probably the handiest for helping build AutoCat rules.

Click here to access a view only copy of the spreadsheet used in the demo

Q&A

I’ve been manually adding previous data from my bank accounts. What’s the formula or simplest way to order my transaction date from newest to oldest?
You can sort by the Date column in your Transactions sheet.

how do you import from other financial software (won’t name names!!!)? similarly to what you did directly from financial institutions?
Check out some of the options in the Tiller Community Solutions add-on for CSV formats that it can ingest and add to your Transactions sheet.

What would be the pros and cons of creating separate workbooks per year? Versus having all years of data in the same workbook?
If you separate the yearly data into different sheets you’re less likely to run into performance issues down the road due to a large data set, but then your data is in multiple places. The sheets, if you don’t have too many extra formula intensive solutions, can handle several years of data so there isn’t really a need to create separate yearly sheets unless you need more intensive dashboards.

How do I add the Tag column?
Here are the steps for adding the Tag column to the Categories sheet.

Is the Category Rollup the same thing more or less as the Pivot Table?
The Category Rollup report is different in that it will more easily give you the transaction detail right in a cleaner look. If you use the Tags in Categories sheet option you can also use the report to filter based on that tag rather than needing to remember and individually filter each category you wan to report on for tax time.

Can you have multiple tags per transaction?
For clarity, there are two approaches for Tags documented and mentioned here on the Community. Tagging transactions and tagging categories. In either case, yes, you can apply multiple tags to either a transaction or a category. You can use both approaches, but only the transactions tags show up in the Tags Report and only the Category tags show up as filtering options on the Category Rollup Report.

What’s the difference between cut and paste and using hover and drag to fill in dates or vendors when adding manual transactions?
Copy/paste is a little less error prone because of the way the “quick fill square” enumerates numbers and dates.

As someone new to tiller sheets I wonder how many viewing hours are needed with the videos before I am up to speed?
There is no minimum, and this really depends on your learning style. If you prefer not to watch videos you can review written content. It does help to have a basic knowledge of Google Sheets.

How do you separate years if you choose to do that?
Here is more content on our Help Center about how you would “archive” a previous year.

Does Tiller charge an extra fee to use the Community tools?
There is no extra cost to use the Tiller Community Solutions add-on. This is a community-built tool. Everything in that add-on is supported in the Tiller Community.

I see you have an IRA account linked; what about other investment accounts? So we would name them as such under Type? Rather than expense, retirement or ___
I’d recommend reviewing this topic or this one on how to think about categories for organizing IRA transactions.