Build Your Own Way to Understand Your Money
Tiller keeps your financial life updated in spreadsheets you own, ready to feed your custom dashboards, money trackers, apps, and AI workflows.
Tiller Builder Guides
Learn how to build an app, or customize your storefront. Whether you’re just getting started, deep in the development process, or ready to distribute and monetize your work, Shopify’s docs, dev tools and frameworks make building easy and efficient. Build formulas, reports, models, and scripts in a Tiller workbook in Microsoft Excel. Use its data in apps you build beyond the workbook. Build formulas, reports, dashboards, and scripts in a Tiller spreadsheet in Google Sheets. Use its data in apps you build beyond the spreadsheet.
Google Sheets
Build for Google Sheets
Start here:
+ Tiller Builder’s Guide for Google Sheets
+ Google Sheets Community Builds
Google Resources for Google Sheets
+Table references named functions.
+ AppSheet
AI and Google Sheets
New: Google’s Sheets canvas uses Gemini to build interactive mini-apps connected to sheet data.
Sheet Sanitizer
Create a copy of a Tiller spreadsheet with sensitive financial details obscured so you can troubleshoot, demonstrate, or share your work.
Sheet Sanitizer documentation
Build for Microsoft Excel
Start here:
+ Tiller Builder’s Guide For Microsoft Excel
+ Demo data for Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Resources for Excel
+ Excel APIs in Microsoft Graph.
+ Dynamic arrays and LAMBDA.
+ Office Scripts with Power Automate
AI and Microsoft Excel
Tiller Builder’s Guides
Tiller’s Builder’s Guides document the core sheets, standard headers, IDs, references, and conventions used across Tiller spreadsheets.
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Demo Data
Use Apps Script, Python, and APIs to connect your Tiller spreadsheet to an automation, app, or dashboard. + Google Sheets demo data
Join an active builder community
Tiller’s community brings together builders of every experience level. AI now helps even more people build with their data.
Build with AI
Tiller keeps your data organized and updated in a clean, structured spreadsheets. Tiller spreadsheets are engineered to track your financial life across all your connected accounts in a clean, consistent format AI can readily read and analyze.
why build with spreadsheets
Own the source behind how AI understands your financial life.
Switch or test different AI tools without losing your financial context. Your transactions, balances, financial history, and categories stay in a spreadsheet you own
Tiller spreadsheets are optimized for AI, ready for you to build daily briefs, dashboard, and mini-apps.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT can
Claude
Gemini
Google Canvas
Build with AI
AI is only as good as the data it works from.
AI can analyze the categories, rules, and history you’ve built over time, so answers reflect how you understand your money. And you can check any answer against the source. The strongest idea is that you no longer need to know how to build a tracker before you can describe the tracker you want. That makes Tiller’s spreadsheet flexibility available to more people, for more personal uses.
For this section, I see five ideas worth carrying forward:
Start with what you wish you could see. A spending dashboard with only the numbers you care about. A tracker built around your shared-expense agreement. A forecast for irregular income. The excitement comes from making the exact view you’ve wanted.
Describe it, try it, change it. The source’s strongest line is: “You no longer need to know exactly how to build something before you can describe what you want.” That gives readers a clear way to begin and permission to experiment.
Your build can go beyond rows and columns. The post describes dashboards, email briefs, alerts, and mobile interfaces using spreadsheet data. The spreadsheet can hold the financial history while you choose how to see and use it.
AI can help build a tracker that works without AI. This is a particularly useful distinction. The shared-expense script illustrates it: AI helps write the code; the finished script does the recurring work. Building with AI doesn’t always mean adding an ongoing AI dependency.
Tiller keeps supplying the financial activity. This connects the creative promise to the product. You’re building around transactions and balances that Tiller automatically updates, rather than making a dashboard from an export that soon needs replacing.
My recommendation: frame the section around the pleasure and practical value of building a financial tracker that fits how you think. Show a small spreadsheet improvement beside a more ambitious dashboard or app, so “building” feels accessible.
Ownership, checking calculations, and choosing an AI belong as supporting reassurance. The main invitation is: What have you always wanted your money tracker to show you?
I’d avoid the draft’s “anyone can build exactly what they need” claim. It promises too much. The more credible and compelling idea is that AI makes more of those personal ideas possible without requiring you to master formulas or code first.
Start with clean data
Make sense of your data
Ask AI to analyze transactions, categories, and history in your spreadsheet. Ask questions about your spending and trends.
Build the tools you need
Ask AI to analyze transactions, categories, and history in your spreadsheet. Ask questions about your spending and trends.
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Optimized Format
Your financial life in spreadsheet, optimized for AI
A clean financial source owned by you.
One consistent structure for every account. Standard headers give AI predictable fields to filter, group, and compare your financial data across institutions.
Unique IDs enable reliable matching. Stable Transaction, Account, and Balance IDs give AI references for account-level queries, and database-style joins.
Direct table queries protect context limits. Tiller’s structure lets AI query and retrieve only the exact rows it needs, reducing errors and saving token limits.
Your categories tell AI what transactions mean to you. Your category rules tell AI when a transaction is personal, reimbursable, or something else.
Dedicated balance history prevents guesswork. AI can pull historical balances from Balance History instead of calculating past balances from daily spending rows.
Saved edits carry your financial context forward. Splits, notes, category changes, and added columns inform later questions and reports
Explicit logic handles financial edge cases. Income, Expense, and Transfer labels tell AI how to process transactions, preventing transfers from being counted as new spending or income.
Separate sheets isolate raw activity from reports. Balances and Transactions are separate from budgets and dashboards so AI doesn’t confuse them with source transactions.
Spreadsheet math ensures verifiable calculations. Formulas, pivots, queries, and scripts execute directly in the sheet, letting you audit AI answers in place outside the chat.
Tiller spreadsheets are engineered to track your financial life across all your connected accounts in a clean, consistent format AI can readily read and analyze.
Builder’s Toolkit
Build a report for yourself, automate a workflow, or create something other Tiller customers can use. Tiller gives you structured financial data, documented conventions, sample data, and working examples to build from.
Start here
Tiller’s Builder’s Guides document the core sheets, standard headers, IDs, references, and conventions used across Tiller spreadsheets.
Follow these patterns when you want your build to work across different Tiller spreadsheets instead of depending on one specific file.
Builder’s Guide for Google Sheets
Builder’s Guide for Microsoft Excel
Test and share your build.
Use the tools your build needs.
Google Sheets and Excel
Build reports, models, trackers, and dashboards with formulas, pivots, charts, queries, tables, and native spreadsheet functions.
AI
Write formulas, draft scripts, build queries, analyze financial activity, and prototype tools or interfaces.
Apps Script and Office Scripts
Automate spreadsheet tasks, process data, generate reports, and connect your spreadsheet to other workflows.
Python
Analyze Tiller data, build models, transform data, and create more complex financial tools.
Google Sheets API and Microsoft Graph
Read spreadsheet data into web apps, mobile interfaces, automations, and other software you build.
AppSheet and Power Automate
Turn spreadsheet data into workflows, interfaces, notifications, and lightweight applications with less code.
X
Tiller Investments Beta brings your holdings into Google Sheets, giving you new ways to track and analyze your investments along with your transactions, balances, and net worth.
To mark the release, we’re inviting Tiller builders to create dashboards, charts, reports, and visualizations using the new Holdings and Holdings History sheets.
Build a compelling way to understand investment holdings and enter for a chance to win up to $1,000. Learn more ›
Built by the Tiller Community
See what others have built with Tiller to understand their money, their way.
Spending Planner. Connect daily spending to a financial plan and know what remains for the day and month. View ›
“How can I see what I can safely spend today?” – alexandrawilsonplans
Sinking Fund and Savings Tracker. Track savings goals without losing sight of the account where the money lives. View ›
“How do I track big multi-account goals inside Tiller?” – @Lulu
Personal Web Frontend. A rich desktop and mobile app powered by a Tiller spreadsheet, built with Claude. View ›
“Can I bring my Tiller data into a custom desktop and mobile app?” – @folkhero
Builder Resources
Builder Resources
Understanding Tiller’s spreadsheet structure.
Transactions
Use individual transactions with consistent fields for dates, amounts, accounts, institutions, categories, descriptions, and IDs.
Balance History
Use dated account balances to calculate net worth, track account values, and build historical views.
Categories
Define how transactions should be treated in reports, formulas, and analysis.
Categories
Define how transactions should be treated in reports, formulas, and analysis.
AutoCat
Create rules that categorize transactions, change descriptions, add notes or tags, and write values to supported custom columns.
How to Use AutoCat
Custom columns
Add fields for the information your build needs, such as reimbursements, tax treatment, projects, or workflow status.
Editing the Transactions Sheet
Holdings and Holdings History
Use current and historical investment positions from supported connected accounts to build investment reports, charts, and tools.
Build on Tiller’s core financial data.
Transactions
Use individual transactions with consistent fields for dates, amounts, accounts, institutions, categories, descriptions, and IDs.
Transactions Sheet Columns
Balance History
Use dated account balances to calculate net worth, track account values, and build historical views.
Understanding the Balance History Sheet
Categories
Define how transactions should be treated in reports, formulas, and analysis.
Customizing Categories
AutoCat
Create rules that categorize transactions, change descriptions, add notes or tags, and write values to supported custom columns.
How to Use AutoCat
Custom columns
Add fields for the information your build needs, such as reimbursements, tax treatment, projects, or workflow status.
Editing the Transactions Sheet
Holdings and Holdings History
Use current and historical investment positions from supported connected accounts to build investment reports, charts, and tools.
Investments Beta and Builder Contest
Start from a working Tiller spreadsheet.
Foundation Template
See Tiller’s core sheets, formulas, and reports working together in a complete financial spreadsheet.
Explore the Foundation Template
One consistent structure for every account. Standard headers give AI predictable fields to filter, group, and compare your financial data across institutions.
Unique IDs enable reliable matching. Stable Transaction, Account, and Balance IDs give AI references for account-level queries, and database-style joins.
Direct table queries protect context limits. Tiller’s structure lets AI query and retrieve only the exact rows it needs, reducing errors and saving token limits.
Your categories tell AI what transactions mean to you. Your category rules tell AI when a transaction is personal, reimbursable, or something else.
Dedicated balance history prevents guesswork. AI can pull historical balances from Balance History instead of calculating past balances from daily spending rows.
Saved edits carry your financial context forward. Splits, notes, category changes, and added columns inform later questions and reports
Explicit logic handles financial edge cases. Income, Expense, and Transfer labels tell AI how to process transactions, preventing transfers from being counted as new spending or income.
Separate sheets isolate raw activity from reports. Balances and Transactions are separate from budgets and dashboards so AI doesn’t confuse them with source transactions.
Spreadsheet math ensures verifiable calculations. Formulas, pivots, queries, and scripts execute directly in the sheet, letting you audit AI answers in place outside the chat.
Standard headers give AI predictable fields to filter, group, and compare your financial data across institutions.
Splits, notes, category changes, and added columns inform later questions and reports
Stable Transaction, Account, and Balance IDs give AI references for account-level queries, and database-style joins.
Your category rules tell AI when a transaction is personal, reimbursable, or something else.
Foundation Template
Income, Expense, and Transfer labels tell AI how to process transactions, preventing transfers from being counted as new spending or income.
Balances and Transactions are separate from budgets and dashboards so AI doesn’t confuse them with source transactions.
AI can pull historical balances from Balance History instead of calculating past balances from daily spending rows.
Tiller’s structure lets AI query and retrieve only the exact rows it needs, reducing errors and saving token limits.
