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How to Manually Import Your Bank Data
How to Manually Import Your Bank Data

Steps for manually adding historical or unsupported account data to your Tiller spreadsheets

Heather Phillips avatar
Written by Heather Phillips
Updated over a week ago

If one of your Institutions isn't currently supported by Tiller, there is an outage or disconnection, or you want to get historical transaction and balance data into your sheet you can quickly and easily get your data into your spreadsheet using these manual steps.

If you're looking for tax time prep tips, check out our guide here.

If you want an automate these steps for Google Sheets, check out the Solutions from the Tiller Community section of this guide. Please note, community solutions are supported in the Tiller Community, not via chat/email.

Manually importing transactions

1. Get the data from your bank

  1. Log in to your bank or financial institution.

  2. Download a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file or a .XLSX file for all the transactions you want in your Transactions sheet.

    1. You may need to specify the date range before grabbing the data to ensure everything you want is included in the CSV.

    2. If your bank doesn't offer a CSV or .XLSX download, you can try copy/pasting the table of transactions into a blank spreadsheet.

  3. Be sure you know where the file was saved. Usually this is the downloads folder.

Note: you can also manually import data from Mint.com and Personal Capital.

2. Choose how to work with the CSV file

Recommended for Google Sheets:

Upload your CSV to Google Drive

  1. Navigate to your Google Drive.

  2. Drag and drop the spreadsheet file into your Google Drive.

  3. Open the spreadsheet file using Google Sheets.

Recommend for Microsoft Excel:

  1. Open your CSV or .XLSX file in Excel or copy/paste the transactions you copied into a blank Excel workbook

3. Format the data

Once you have the spreadsheet file open in either a new Google Sheet or Excel workbook you'll need to prepare the data for adding to your Tiller spreadsheet. These steps help ensure that the columns in your export match the column order of your Tiller Transactions sheet so things get pasted in the right spot.

  1. Review the data from your bank. There might be extra columns that aren't in the Transactions sheet in your Tiller spreadsheet.

  2. Delete any columns you don’t need. Right click on a column header letter to delete.

  3. Rearrange the columns to match the order in your Transactions sheet.

    1. Google Sheets: you can rearrange by hovering over the column header until you see a hand icon, which will allow you to drag and drop a column into a new location in the sheet.

    2. Microsoft Excel: you can rearrange by clicking the column letter header to select the entire column, hold shift, then hover over the right side edge of the column until a hand icon appears. Once that appears drag and drop the column in the new position while still holding the shift key.

4. Make sure you have the columns you'll need

Depending on any customizations you might have made to your Transactions sheet, your column order may be different than these. Make sure the columns in your CSV match your live Transactions sheet and include these at a minimum. 

  1. Date

  2. Description

  3. Amount

  4. Category (if applicable) 

4.a. Adding Month and Week Data (optional)

If you'd like to see the Month and Week data associated with these manual transactions (which is optional, but useful if you want to build a pivot table with the data and may be required for some community solutions) add a column to the prep spreadsheet in the position where Month and Week are in your Tiller Transactions sheet.

Reference these guides for the formulas for filling in Month and Week data in your prep sheet. formula for automatically filling in Month and the formula for automatically filling in Week.

⚠️ It's important to do this step BEFORE you paste your manual data into the Transactions sheet because Tiller Money Feeds automatically fills in Month and Week data for new automated transactions.

5. Copy your transaction data

Once you have the columns ordered to match your Transactions sheet and all the data prepared:

  1. Select all the data, excluding the header row.

  2. Right click and choose copy.

6. Paste your bank data into the Transactions sheet

  1. In your Tiller spreadsheet, scroll to the bottom of the transactions sheet where there are empty cells.

    1. If you don't see any empty cells, right click the row number to insert 1.

  2. Click into the first empty cell you plan to copy, usually this is the date cell.

  3. Right click and choose "Paste Special > Values Only" so you don't copy the formatting from the other spreadsheet.

    1. If the formatting looks off you can use the undo button to remove the data and try a different paste option - Excel can be more sensitive than Google Sheets with how the paste works.

  4. Update the data for each of these newly added transactions for any other columns in your Transactions sheet that weren’t provided by the bank like Institution, Account #, etc. 

    1. Tip: use the Fill Handle to quickly drag down account and institution name. Use Shift + Paste for Account numbers so these don't automatically enumerate.

(optional, Google Sheets only) Reset the filter

If your filter is on in Google Sheets you'll want to reset it so that the new data gets included in the filter and can be sorted.

  1. Select all the data using the selector rectangle in the upper left (above row 1 and to the left of column A)

  2. Turn the filter off and then back on. 

(optional) Sort the data

  1. Click the filtering and sorting arrow on the Date column and choose the Z→ A option to sort by newest first.

Demo of steps 3-6 for Google Sheets

Balances

You can modify the steps above as needed to get historical Balance History data into your Balance History sheet.

The Balance History sheet is hidden by default.

In Google Sheets: unhide from the View menu at the top > Hidden Sheets

In Microsoft Excel: right click any tab and choose "Unhide" to open a dialog and unhide the Balance History sheet.

If your account is not supported for automated bank data feeds and you're using Google Sheets you can manually track balances using the Tiller Money Feeds add-on.

Manually tracking balances during an outage

If there is an outage or disconnection and you're waiting for our data provider to resume the connection you can manually add Balance History entries to keep your balances up to date during the disconnection.

  1. Unhide the Balance History sheet if it's hidden

  2. Copy an existing entry for the institution.

  3. Insert a row above row 2 (right click to insert 1 above)

  4. Paste the entry into this new row.

  5. Modify the date and amount for the Balance History entry.

Using Tiller Money Feeds for Google Sheets to manually track balances during an outage

If you want to use Tiller Money Feeds for Google Sheets to manually track balances for an automated account during an outage use these steps:

  1. Unhide the Balance History sheet if it's hidden

  2. Unhide the Account ID column if it's not visible

  3. Filter the sheet to show only entries for one account at a time that you need to manually track

  4. Add "manual:" (no quotes - just manual: < the : is important) to the front of the Account ID. The Account ID will look something like manual:636e56c864fff40037bd7023 after you make this change.

  5. Update every entry for that account to use the new manual account ID. Make sure you hold shift+paste after selecting the account ID cells for all the entries. Do not use the fill handle for this!

  6. Repeat for other accounts you need to track manually by changing the filter.

  7. From here you can use the Tiller Money Feeds add-on sidebar to manually update the balance for these accounts.

  8. When the feed is restored, you'll need to remove the "manual:" from all these entries back the automated account ID.

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