“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” – Peter Drucker

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Trying to have conversations about saving, spending and planning for retirement is infinitely more difficult and more stressful without accurate numbers in front of you.

You fall back on anecdotes and feelings because you have nothing else to go on.

Conversations start with phrases like: “it feels like we haven’t spent much on eating out this month” and they don’t get any better from there.

My wife and I have two beautiful boys, aged 1 and 3, and we’re both ambitious with our careers and work full-time. Life is crazy, crazy busy for us right now.

We’ve found it challenging to find time to manage our family finances, so we’ve been in this position of flying blind without a financial tracking plan in place. We’ve had those frustrating conversations, knowing that if we had better insights into our financial habits we could do a much better job at financial planning.

I want to show you how we changed that.

How we created a system in Google Sheets for tracking our spending habits.

It now only takes us about 10 or 15 minutes each week, so we can focus on understanding our financial situation better, and maximize our saving.

Enter Tiller

Tiller is an amazing tool that connects our bank accounts and credit cards securely to Google Sheets (or Excel), and automatically updates them on a daily basis.

It means we can see all of our financial transactions in one place and do our own custom analysis in Google Sheets.

It’s been transformative for our family’s sanity and helped us get on top of our spending and hit our saving goals.

Tiller has a suite of Google Sheet templates available too, covering spending, saving, budgeting and net worth tracking, so that you can visualize your financial data immediately.

Of course, you can also build your own solutions to answer whatever questions you have.

It costs $59/year, which is tremendous value since you’re getting a fully customizable, automated personal finance tool.

How to setup Tiller with Google Sheets

Tiller is a third-party tool so you have to create an account with them, which is done securely through your Google account credentials.
Continue reading How we manage our family finances with Google Sheets

A Beginner’s Guide to Pivot Tables in Google Sheets

If you use Google Sheets, or any spreadsheet application for that matter, but don’t use Pivot Tables, then you’re missing out on one of the most powerful and useful features available.

This tutorial will (attempt to) demystify Pivot Tables and give you the confidence to start using them in your own work.

Contents

1. An Introduction to Pivot Tables
   • What are Pivot Tables?
   • Why use Pivot Tables?
   • How to create your first Pivot Table
   • Let Google build them for you

2. Pivot Tables: Fundamentals
   • Rows, columns and values
   • Totals
   • Sorting

3. Pivot Tables: Tips and Tricks
   • Multiple value fields
   • Changing aggregation types
   • Adding filters
   • Multiple row fields
   • Copying Pivot Tables

4. Pivot Tables: Next steps

1. An Introduction to Pivot Tables

What are Pivot Tables?

Let’s see a super simple example, to demonstrate how Pivot Tables work. Consider this dataset:

You want to summarize the data and answer questions like: how many apartments are there in the dataset? What’s the total cost of all the apartments?

Now, this would be easy to do with formulas, using a COUNTIF and a SUMIF, but if you change our mind and now want to summarize “Condo” you have to modify all your formulas, which is a pain.

Enter the Pivot Table:

This took me eight mouse clicks and I didn’t have to write a single formula (in a few paragraphs I’ll show you those exact 8 clicks so you can build your own version).
Continue reading Pivot Tables 101: A Beginner’s Guide