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How to Use Tiller to Organize Your Finances for Tax Time
How to Use Tiller to Organize Your Finances for Tax Time

Learn how to use Tiller to make taxes easier.

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

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. Here are a few Google Sheets workflows for using Tiller to help prepare for tax time for both personal and/or self employment income.

We put together this quick demo video of the different options for getting your tax information organized. You can also read more on these options below the video.

If you need to get all of your historical data from last year into your Google Sheet you can follow along with these steps.

Personal Taxes

We offer a few workflows for helping you prepare for your personal tax filing. 

Detailed itemized deduction reporting 

If you prefer to use an itemized deduction amount on your tax return vs the standard deduction you can use the Category Rollup report to get a detailed analysis for your tax deductible spending. If you’re not sure if you should itemize, consult with an accountant or tax advisor.

You can easily export or print the report to send to your accountant. 

  1. Tag your tax deductible categories as “Tax” on the Categories sheet.

  2. Run the Category Rollup report and choose the "Tax" category in the Tag filter configuration option.

Visualize your yearly category total spend

Pivot tables are an easy way to get your total spending for all categories. You can easily filter the pivot table to show you only what you need to see for your tax preparation and easily share with your accountant. 

A category pivot table by year is really simple with Google Sheets. 

Watch

Watch the video below to see the Category Rollup report and Yearly Spending Pivot table demo. (Skip ahead to minute 11:49 if you already have all your past year's data in your sheet and categorized).

Self Employed & Small Business Taxes

Tiller also offers workflows for helping you keep track of your tax related small business expenses and business related itemized deduction expenses.

Itemized Deduction Reporting

You can use the same Category Rollup report for itemized deduction reporting as documented in the “Personal Taxes” section above. 

Estimated Quarterly Taxes

If you’re a sole proprietor, freelancer, or consultant with a simply structured business, Tiller can also help you estimate your quarterly taxes with the Estimated Quarterly Tax sheet. Your estimated quarterly taxes will be based on real time spending data as it flows into your Transactions sheet, plus any manual adjustments you include. You can also use it to project your estimated taxes for each quarter.

Results are most accurate for individuals filing single that are self employed with a business set up as a sole proprietor or a single member LLC that does not file as an S-corp where the self employment is the only source of income.

Get started in 3 easy steps:

Please note: Access to the Estimated Quarterly Tax sheet is provided as a convenience to help you estimate your state and federal quarterly taxes for the tax year indicated. Its use for any other purpose, including the calculation and preparation of income tax forms for filing with the IRS, is beyond the scope of this tool. Tiller makes no guarantee in regard to the accuracy of the calculations, tax rates or results. Consult a tax advisor or accountant to validate the accuracy of the results. 

Recommendations for staying organized

Keep business and personal separate. 

We recommend that you use separate accounts for business and personal spending. When your business transactions are co-mingled with your personal transactions it’s more challenging to keep the data organized. 

Organize categories clearly.

If you do have mixed personal and business transactions using categories intentionally can help you stay organized. Even if you don’t mix them it’s a good idea to have a strong category structure to make things easier. 

For example, if you use the same debit card to pay for parking for both business and personal trips, you probably want a separate “business - parking” category so you can tag that one as “business” and make sure that the personal parking doesn’t get mixed in. 

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