You built a beautiful Tiller spreadsheet that tracks every penny. It still does not tell you whether you can retire at 60. Here is what is missing.
Tiller is a data pipeline, not a planner. It populates your spreadsheet with transactions, balances, and category tags. From there, you can build any view you want, including projections, if you write the formulas. The default Tiller template is a tracker, not a forecast.
Delphina plans. It knows UK pension rules, your State Pension forecast through your NI record, ISA subscription limits, and the standard 4% safe withdrawal rate. You add your accounts, and the platform gives you a date for retirement, a gap to close, and a monthly action. No formulas required.
Tiller wins on data integration and transparency. Every number is in a cell. You can audit the entire picture, you can build your own assumptions, and you can run scenarios in the spreadsheet the way you would in any financial model. For someone with a finance background who wants full visibility, this is the right shape of tool.
Tiller also handles non-standard income well. Rental property cash flows, freelance income with irregular payments, side hustle revenue across platforms: all of it can be merged into the same spreadsheet as your bank transactions. The customisability is genuinely useful.
Delphina gives you a retirement date without writing a single formula. The platform does the modelling, the State Pension inclusion, the drawdown order logic, and the projection forward. You do not need to know what a withdrawal rate is or how Monte Carlo works. You see the answer.
Delphina also updates the plan automatically. When your pay changes, when you make a one-off pension contribution, when your spending shifts because you started working from home more, the projection moves. With Tiller, you would have to update the inputs yourself every time.
Pull your State Pension forecast from gov.uk and your latest pension statement. Connect both to Delphina this week alongside your Tiller-tracked accounts. The 20 minutes you spend setting up the connection will replace hours of manual spreadsheet work going forward, and you will have a single number that answers the question your spreadsheet cannot.