Personal finance app or Excel: which should you choose?

Choosing how to track your money seems like a small decision, but it sets how much time you spend on numbers every month. The question is not which option is more modern: it is which one you will actually keep up.

What Excel does well

A spreadsheet costs little or nothing and gives you total control. You can split spending by project, trip or person, and write any formula you like. No app gives you as much freedom to design the system your way.

If you enjoy working with numbers and already have the habit, you do not need to change.

Where Excel starts costing you time

• Logging on a phone is awkward, so purchases get left for later and the smallest ones are forgotten.
• A new column means checking sums and references, and one wrong cell can spoil the month without you noticing.
• A sheet only warns you about a limit if you build that warning and open the file to see it.
• Charts and month-to-month comparisons are also up to you.

What changes with an app

In an app, you pick the amount and the category and you are done, on your phone, at the moment you pay. Totals and charts by category and month appear without formulas. Many apps also warn you when you get close to a limit.

There are downsides too. You have less freedom than in a sheet, the more advanced features are often paid and, unless the app connects to your bank, logging is still something you do yourself, only faster.

Three questions to decide

1. Will you really log your spending in a sheet? If you tend to give up after a week, the speed of an app matters more than flexibility.
2. Do you share your money with someone? A cloud spreadsheet works well here, and not every app lets you share budgets.
3. Do you only want totals, or help understanding them too? For totals, a sheet is enough. For alerts and explanations, an app is less work.

Try the busy month test: use your chosen method during a month full of work. Whatever is still up to date at the end is the right method for you.

About FinanceFlow

FinanceFlow works in the browser and on Android. On the free plan you log income and expenses in seconds and see where your money goes, by category and by month. Paid plans let you scan receipts, set limits with alerts, ask AI to explain your statistics and export your data to CSV if you want to keep analysing it in a sheet. Two things it does not do: it does not connect to bank accounts, and each account is individual, with no shared budgets.