Welcome to the Tiller for Small Business Comprehensive Guide. Use this guide as a self paced resource for building a strong financial foundation with Tiller for your business and personal finances.
Mostly likely you've already started a free trial, but if not, sign up at https://my.tiller.com/signup
ℹ️ You do not need to switch email addresses or sign up under a different account to try both Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. You can use either authentication type (Google or Microsoft) and still use both platforms under the same subscription/account.
Step 1: Get connected
Now that you’ve started a trial you can connect all your financial accounts to Tiller and easily start seeing spending and balances for all your accounts in one place. You can add all types of accounts including credit cards, investments, loans, and more.
How to connect financial institutions to Tiller
Log in to the Tiller Console at https://my.tiller.com
Click "Add accounts" near the top or if you've already added some accounts and want to add more scroll down to the Connected Account Summary and click “Add accounts”
Search for your financial institution and select it from the list.
Enter your username and password for the institution. The same username and password you'd use to log in to the account directly online.
Once successfully added you should see the institution name and a list of accounts appear on the Console under the Account Summary.
Apply account nicknames to accounts on the Console before you create your first spreadsheet. Read more here.
Troubleshooting account connection issues
If you have issues connecting a financial account, review our guide here and keep going with the next steps for accounts you can connect.
ℹ️ Resources
Step 2: Create a spreadsheet to see all of your data in one place
You can have up to five Tiller-powered spreadsheets per subscription, with your choice of accounts linked to each spreadsheet. If you are tracking both business and personal finances separately, we recommend you create a spreadsheet for each purpose. If you intermingle your personal and business finances, you may need to create strong categories to help differentiate this spending within your spreadsheet.
How to create a spreadsheet:
Login to the Tiller Console at https://my.tiller.com
Under "Create a spreadsheet" choose "Start with Google Sheets" or "Start with Microsoft Excel" to open or download the Foundation Template on your preferred platform.
Note, if you’ve already linked one spreadsheet you’ll need to click on “Create a spreadsheet” to open the section for access to the template buttons.
If you're new to spreadsheets we recommend Google Sheets.
If you're familiar with spreadsheets, and unsure which platform to choose, review this guide.
If you choose Microsoft Excel be sure to save the Excel file to a location where you'll remember how to find and open it or which user's OneDrive you used to uploaded it if stored on OneDrive.
Follow the instructions on the Install Help sheet (first tab along the bottom) in the spreadsheet template to install Tiller Money Feeds and fill your spreadsheet with your latest transactions and balances.
Follow the tips below to learn how to keep your bank data flowing into your spreadsheet and get set up to use the Foundation Template.
If you prefer not to use our Foundation template:
You can connect Tiller Money Feeds to a blank workbook or your own spreadsheet.
Review our guide on connecting Tiller's financial feeds to your existing Google Sheet.
Review our guide on connecting Tiller's financial feeds to your existing Excel Workbook.
How to find your spreadsheet later
After you've linked your first spreadsheet to Tiller it's name will appear in the Linked Spreadsheets section on the Tiller Console (https://my.tiller.com).
Google Sheets are stored on your Google Drive. You can click a Google Sheet's name on the Tiller Console and click the "open" button in the upper right corner of the spreadsheet's details.
Microsoft Excel workbooks are usually stored locally on your computer or on OneDrive. You can open the workbook from the location where you saved it after downloading the Foundation Template.
How Tiller works
Tiller uses Tiller Money Feeds as the bridge between your bank data and your spreadsheet. We use a 3rd party data aggregation partner (Yodlee or Plaid) to pull the data into our databases. Once that data is available in our databases, after a "refresh," it's available to fill into your spreadsheet using Tiller Money Feeds.
You can find the Tiller Money Feeds add-on in the Extensions menu in your Google Sheet or the Home ribbon under Add-ins in Microsoft Excel. Google Sheets will automatically fill available data about every six hours. Excel requires that you launch the add-in and click the "Fill" button.
Some institutions cannot refresh automatically (so no new data will be available for those) and will require your intervention on Tiller Console at https://my.tiller.com.
Tiller can pull up to 30-90 days worth of data for most institutions, but this varies by institution. Use these tips if you need to add more historical data.
ℹ️ Resources
Step 3: Refine your categories
Set up your own custom categories or copy in our example business categories.
Speak with your accountant if you're unsure what category setup to use. Tiller support is unable to advise you on what category structure to use for your business.
You can learn more about building and customizing your own categories and groups in this guide. Just remember:
Categories need to be unique, but you can add a prepend to help organize based on your needs.
Groups are the bigger bucket that categories fall into. Groups are completely custom.
Only Income, Expense, and Transfer are supported Types. Do not edit the Type dropdown to include other types or you'll break the template.
If you want to get started with the example business categories you can find a couple options via the link below. You can copy and paste these in as a starting point then refine from there.
Clear the Foundation Template default categories, groups, types, and hide settings from the Categories sheet.
Open the example business categories sheet and choose one of the sets that works best for you.
Schedule-C is more specific to the Schedule-C tax categories.
Simple List is a simplified and shorter list of common business categories.
Copy/paste the categories from the sample Categories sheet into your spreadsheet
You can also review your transactions in the Transactions sheet to help you refine your Categories list. A useful way to quickly see your most common merchants and transactions is to sort by the Description column.
ℹ️ Resources
Check out Tiller’s Financial Professionals Directory to see a list of professionals that are familiar with Tiller if you're not currently working with a financial professional
Step 4: Categorize your transactions
By default your transaction data is not categorized. Once you've decided on your categories list, spend time categorizing your transactions to gain insights about your business spending, earning, and cash flow.
We recommend exploring AutoCat for faster categorization when you're getting started.
ℹ️ Resources
Step 5: Visualize your data
Once you’ve categorized your transaction data your insights are ready. Check in on your built-in spreadsheet templates to quickly see a breakdown of your income vs expense for a selected time period, zero in on spending or earning for a specific category, pinpoint your cash flow, and understand spending and income breakdown by group.
You can also install additional templates, like the Simple P&L, to get just the right reporting for your business.
Built Into the Foundation Template
The Foundation Template comes with a few helpful out of the box templates that may serve your business needs.
Monthly Budget sheet
The Monthly Budget sheet gives you a breakdown of planned vs actual spending and income as well as a planned vs actual cash flow analysis. You’ll create budget amounts in your Categories sheet then use the Monthly Budget sheet to see if you are on track to meet those budget targets.
Yearly Budget sheet
Similar to the Monthly Budget sheet, you can use the Yearly Budget view to compare your budget targets to actual spending over a year period. Analyze your cash flow for the entire year based on the budget amounts you set on the Categories sheet.
Spending Trends sheet
The Spending Trends sheet helps showcase key insights about your spending and earning during customizable time periods, to include your assets and liabilities.
Balances sheet
The Balances sheet allows you to organize your accounts by custom groups. You can also set up your spreadsheet to use the Balances sheet as a "balance sheet" your accountant may want by adding manual accounts to your spreadsheet.
Install using Tiller Money Feeds
The Templates feature in Tiller Money Feeds allows you to install additional templates on top of your Foundation.
Simple P&L
The Simple P&L allows you to report your income, expenses, and cash flow over a customizable time period.
Savings Goals
Visualize your savings goals and track your progress with this simple template based entirely on your real world account balances.
Debt Payoff Tracker
A streamlined debt-planning tool to create and manage your debt payoff plan so you can achieve debt freedom.
Other key workflows
Organizing your finances for tax time
Since Tiller automatically collects your bank data throughout the year, you have a lot of the information you need to file your taxes already at your fingertips. Check out some tips and a webinar on how to best set up your spreadsheet so you have all of the information Tiller provides for tax season.
Step 6: Discover more
⚠️ Templates, tools and workflows from the Tiller Community are built and supported by the Tiller Community, they are not part of Tiller’s core product features. If you have questions on any of the workflows below, please try searching in the community first to see if someone has already posted about this. If not, please create a new topic in Ask Anything. We’d love for other customers to benefit from the answer too.
The Tiller Community is a robust forum where other Tiller customers build templates, create workflows, and share insights for using Tiller beyond what is offered out of the box. Discover additional business related workflows and templates that can help you dive deeper into your data:
Small Business Dashboard
Quick and easy business cash flow, balance, and category insights on the Simple Business Dashboard.
Generating a Category report
The Category Report allows you to drill down and get the transaction details, organized by description, for a single category over a specified time period with granular control over the amount range included in the report.
Reconcile manual scheduled transactions
Tiller keeps all your business financial data in one place for you by automatically pulling in transactions and balances into your Google Sheet. The Tiller Community Solutions add-on goes a step further by allowing you to manually add transactions through our add-on, flag them for reconciliation, and then later reconcile and merge them when Tiller brings in the match. It also offers workflows for balancing your bank statement to your transactions list.
These are optional steps that you may or may not need or use depending on your business’ workflows and reporting needs.
Reconcile bank statements
Another key to keeping your business finances in sync is verifying that all the transactions that appear on your bank statement are also available in your Tiller transactions sheet. Statements reconciling helps flag checks that haven’t been cashed yet, unexpected charges, and human & machine errors and is a common business financial workflow.
Track business receipts
If you’d like to track your business receipts add a column called “Receipt” to your transactions sheet. You can right click any column and choose “Insert 1 left or right.” Use this column to pair transaction line items with attachments stored in the could. When URLs are placed inside Google Sheets cells, they can be clicked for instant access to cloud content— like a detailed record of a purchase.
Create a folder on your Google Drive for “Receipts”. Each time you make a purchase take a picture of the receipt, or save it to PDF, and then save it to this folder on your Google Drive.
Paste the URL of the receipt image in your “Receipts” folder into the Receipts column on the Transactions sheet.
Estimate Quarterly Taxes
The Tiller Community Solutions add-on also offers a Estimated Quarterly Tax dashboard perfect for contractors, freelancers, and simply structured businesses.
Generate a Category Rollup Report
Category Rollup report is a great way to visualize your categoric spending over a specific time period with some advanced filtering options. If you want to dive into line item detail for a specific category or generate a line item deduction report for business tax reporting this is a great option.
Property Rental Manager Sheet
The Property Rental Manager template helps you track income and expenses for rental property by reporting the status of one or many rental properties on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis.