Business in one tool, family in another
Kerwendy runs a consulting business and a household of six: two parents and four kids, three of them starting school. The business already had its own project management tool. What was missing was a place for the family: bills with different due dates, income from two jobs and a business, chores, homeschool, a shopping list, a trip coming up.
Keeping the two apart was deliberate. Bringing clients and team into the same place as the kids felt like too much, so xTiles became the family's space. Over two calls, we set it up together.
A finance hub: money in, money out
The finance project holds two collections, which work like spreadsheets you can view in different ways.
- Expense tracker — every bill and purchase with an amount, a date and a category. Kerwendy started from the expense tracker template and adjusted it.
- Income tracker — who the money came from, when it arrived, how much, and what kind: paycheck, business income, a gift.
The goal was simple: see how much came in and how much went out this month, compare it with last month, and look at the whole year. A few ways to get there without doing the math by hand:
- Add a Month property to both collections and group a board view by it. Each month gets its own column, and nothing needs to be re-filtered when a new month starts.
- Add a calendar view by date to see when bills land across the month.
- Add a Person property to the income tracker to split it by parent or by business.
The family also recently bought a home, so the same setup can track house purchases and furniture paid off over several months.
Bills that remind you before they are due
A row in the expense tracker records a bill. It doesn't remind anyone to pay it. For that, each recurring bill gets a task:
Open the bill and add a task
Open the item in the expense tracker — say, a credit card payment — and add a task inside it, like Pay the credit card.
Assign it and give it a date
Assign it to whoever pays that bill and set the due date. In a shared space, a task needs both an assignee and a date to show up in that person's planner.
Make it repeat
Set the task to repeat monthly and add a reminder a few days before, so the bill is on your radar before it is due, not on the day.
Now the bill sits in My Planner next to everything else that week. The weekly money review becomes a quick check of what's paid, instead of hunting through a calendar.
Chores and homeschool: each kid sees their own list
The kids each get their own xTiles account. Kerwendy builds the chore and school schedule once in the kids' shared space, assigns each task to a child with a date, and makes the daily ones repeat.
When a child opens their planner on the tablet, they see only what's theirs for today, pulled in from every project it lives in. A task board grouped by assignee gives the parents one view of who has done what. And when a message is needed — a reminder, a thank-you — a comment on the task does the job without a separate chat app.
A child who wants to organise homework their own way can keep it in their personal space, and still see the family's shared spaces alongside it.
When you are ready: let Claude or ChatGPT build the first draft
Kerwendy uses both Claude and ChatGPT, and building the hub by hand came first. The shortcut for anyone starting from zero: connect xTiles to Claude or ChatGPT and describe what you want in plain words, such as "an expense tracker with amount, date, category and month, and a separate project for chores and groceries." It creates the projects in xTiles, and you adjust from there instead of starting from a blank page.