denverpilot
Tied Down
The assumption here is that you don’t mind giving out account info to a “cloud” service. If that bugs you skip the thread.
Ran across an interesting one the other night and tried it out briefly under their free for 30 days offer and then cancelled, mostly just out of curiosity.
It’s called Tiller and it’s a service someone built to go grab account transactions from whatever accounts you give it — like a lot of financial stuff can do these days — and then it’s entirely built to populate Google Sheets.
For those wondering how they get the data, they’re using Yodlee which has been around quite some time and handles the whole storing of your login info, and gathering transactions and passing them to all sorts of financial products out there. Most of the big name stuff uses them. Or a combo of them and a couple of others. Anyway if you play with this stuff you probably know Yodlee is the back-end but just mentioning it for those unaware.
Anyway. Tiller has a pile of Google Sheets templates and they’re all fine. Sheets to track getting out of debt. Track a normal budget. Track goals. Even track if your spending matches your personal values, whatever that’s for. Nice selection but not a ton of them.
The cool thing is that using their “custom” template if you’re a total spreadsheet nerd, you can use their importing and macros to populate a sheet you design and built yourself. So if you’re already a spreadsheet nerd and like making your own thing, basically with a bit of a learning curve to use their macros and such, you can have your sheet automatically updated.
The downside for heavy spreadsheet nerds is they don’t have their Excel product done yet. But if you can live with the limitations of Google Sheets or even be ultra nerdy and suck the Google Sheet data out into Excel for some things, it’s a pretty neat setup.
They “own” the Google Sheet so they can import data into it and their system shares it with you via Google’s sharing and authentication mechanisms to your Google account — so if you don’t pay their small fee ($5/Mo I believe) the sheet stays and you can still use it, but it stops updating.
I played with it attached to a couple of accounts for a few days and was kinda impressed. A real service built off of Google Docs/Sheets. They also did a decent job on their website popping up beginner help windows and have a fairly extensive knowledge base of common and less common stuff customers have asked them.
Ultimately I don’t need quite that level of spreadsheet geekery right now but I figured I would mention the software here.
Someone doing a ton of transactions who needs to pull all that stuff in and likes writing their own spreadsheet math to analyze something specific and who hates manually messing with downloading CSVs from banks or brokerage accounts and importing them all by hand, might like it.
Plus what a novelty. An actual software platform built off of nothing but a decent website with Q&A help stuff and Google Sheets. Haven’t really seen that done before.
(Ignoring the whole “is Google evil” question also of course...)
Ran across an interesting one the other night and tried it out briefly under their free for 30 days offer and then cancelled, mostly just out of curiosity.
It’s called Tiller and it’s a service someone built to go grab account transactions from whatever accounts you give it — like a lot of financial stuff can do these days — and then it’s entirely built to populate Google Sheets.
For those wondering how they get the data, they’re using Yodlee which has been around quite some time and handles the whole storing of your login info, and gathering transactions and passing them to all sorts of financial products out there. Most of the big name stuff uses them. Or a combo of them and a couple of others. Anyway if you play with this stuff you probably know Yodlee is the back-end but just mentioning it for those unaware.
Anyway. Tiller has a pile of Google Sheets templates and they’re all fine. Sheets to track getting out of debt. Track a normal budget. Track goals. Even track if your spending matches your personal values, whatever that’s for. Nice selection but not a ton of them.
The cool thing is that using their “custom” template if you’re a total spreadsheet nerd, you can use their importing and macros to populate a sheet you design and built yourself. So if you’re already a spreadsheet nerd and like making your own thing, basically with a bit of a learning curve to use their macros and such, you can have your sheet automatically updated.
The downside for heavy spreadsheet nerds is they don’t have their Excel product done yet. But if you can live with the limitations of Google Sheets or even be ultra nerdy and suck the Google Sheet data out into Excel for some things, it’s a pretty neat setup.
They “own” the Google Sheet so they can import data into it and their system shares it with you via Google’s sharing and authentication mechanisms to your Google account — so if you don’t pay their small fee ($5/Mo I believe) the sheet stays and you can still use it, but it stops updating.
I played with it attached to a couple of accounts for a few days and was kinda impressed. A real service built off of Google Docs/Sheets. They also did a decent job on their website popping up beginner help windows and have a fairly extensive knowledge base of common and less common stuff customers have asked them.
Ultimately I don’t need quite that level of spreadsheet geekery right now but I figured I would mention the software here.
Someone doing a ton of transactions who needs to pull all that stuff in and likes writing their own spreadsheet math to analyze something specific and who hates manually messing with downloading CSVs from banks or brokerage accounts and importing them all by hand, might like it.
Plus what a novelty. An actual software platform built off of nothing but a decent website with Q&A help stuff and Google Sheets. Haven’t really seen that done before.
(Ignoring the whole “is Google evil” question also of course...)