I was looking for a program to help manage my finances. My wife and I usually discuss it, and I have a notebook where I write down due dates and project issues that will arise during the course of the next few months. I have used mint, quicken, and YNAB in the past, but I wasn’t completely satisfied with any of them. After doing some research, I decided that I should look at a program I read about on Reddit called Tiller.
Overall, though, Tiller provides a great budget and financial management tool. It allows you to easily track your expenses and income, categorize transactions, and create custom reports. The interface is user-friendly and intuitive, making it easy to navigate and understand your financial data. Since it is based either on Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, most people are able to use it without too much training.
One of the standout features of Tiller is its ability to automatically import transactions from your bank accounts, credit cards, and other financial institutions. This saves a lot of time and effort compared to manually entering every transaction. It does not use Plaid, a common middleware that YNAB and other software use. I have had a lot of issues with Plaid pulling data from all of my banks. Instead, it is using Yoot, and it seems to be doing an amazing job so far!
Tiller also offers a wide range of pre-built templates for budgeting, debt repayment, investment tracking, and more. These templates can be customized to fit your specific needs, or you can create your own from scratch. Even more exciting is the fact that it has a collection of user-made templates to choose from. It is very simple to add and remove templates from your workbook. I am a big fan of the monthly budgeting calendar template and the Net worth templates made by the community.
In terms of security, Tiller takes privacy seriously. Your financial data is encrypted both in transit and at rest, ensuring that it remains secure at all times. As mentioned earlier, it is using a third party to pull the data and then store it in your workbook (either Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel). This does leave a slight risk if the user accidentally shares their data with someone in one of the two cloud services, but that would be the user making a mistake by accident, not the service itself.
So far, Tiller seems to be a breeze for the setup. One potential downside I experienced with Tiller is the issue with linking one of my bank accounts (Aspiration Bank). However, since it was not my main account and was only used for travel purposes, it was not a major inconvenience for me. I plan on troubleshooting the problem soon to see if I can resolve it.
It would also be nice if Tiller looked at adding support for other languages. While the target audience is English-speaking Americans, it would be great to explain its services by adding translations into other languages. Having a multiple-lingual household is a feature that I would like, but it is not a necessity.
Overall, Tiller is a fantastic budgeting tool that can greatly simplify your financial management process. With its easy setup process, automatic transaction importing, customizable templates, and strong security measures, Tiller is definitely worth considering for those looking to improve their budgeting and financial tracking abilities.