TillyGen and Excel

What this is about

Excel remains the finance backbone of production companies: the costing template with its macros, the pivot tables controlling builds quarterly, the offline file that works on a train. Its role next to TillyGen is downstream number processing. Shoot days, crew sizes and resource lists leave TillyGen as CSV; Excel opens them, and the template's rate logic prices the production. Two mechanical details decide whether this feels smooth: separators — German Excel expects semicolons where the CSV may use commas — and encoding, so umlauts survive the trip. Both are checked once per project, then forgotten.

An integration is good when nobody talks about it any more: the data is where it is needed and nobody exports anything.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• The CSV import feeds the existing costing template — plan quantities meet company rates without anyone retyping a number
• Pivot tables over exported plan data answer controlling questions: cost per shoot day, per location, per client across projects
• Excel works offline, which keeps the costing available where productions actually happen — basements, backlots, trains
• Check separator and encoding once on import, so umlauts and columns arrive intact in German Excel setups

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Export the plan data from TillyGen as CSV — shoot days, crew, resources — and open it in Excel via the import dialog, not by double click.
2. Set separator and encoding in that dialog so columns split correctly and special characters survive; save the file as a workbook.
3. Paste or reference the imported data into the company costing template and let its rate logic do what it has done for years.
4. Build the pivots controlling wants — by day, by department, by location — on top of the raw data tab rather than the costing tab.
5. On plan changes, re-export and re-import into the raw tab; the template recalculates, and the difference to the approved budget is visible immediately.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• The workbook becomes the plan: someone adjusts shoot days in Excel, and the schedule in TillyGen never learns about it
• Five copies of the costing file in mail attachments, each 'final', none matching the plan's current quantities
• Double-clicking the CSV instead of importing it, then blaming the data for broken umlauts and merged columns

With TillyGen

The template prices what the plan specifies. TillyGen keeps the specification current, Excel keeps the pricing sharp, and the CSV is the one-way street between them.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.