Still Tracking Money in Excel? Here's When a Spreadsheet Stops Being Enough
By Ian, founder of ThriftyOwl.money
Almost everyone who takes their money seriously starts in a spreadsheet. It's free, you already own it, and it does exactly what you tell it to. A few columns for date, payee, category and amount, a SUM at the bottom, and for the first time you can see where the month went.
That's not a beginner's mistake. For a lot of people it's the right tool for years. The trouble is that a spreadsheet never tells you when it has stopped being the right tool. It just gets slower to maintain, a little less trustworthy, and a little more dependent on the one person who remembers how it works.
Why do spreadsheets work so well at first?
A spreadsheet's strength is that it has no opinions. You decide what a category is, how a month is calculated, and what a "budget" means. There's no subscription, no bank connection to break, and no vendor deciding to retire the product. Nothing is hidden from you, and the file sits on your own machine.
For a single account, one income and a tidy set of categories, that flexibility is hard to beat. The problems arrive as your finances stop being tidy.
What are the seven signs you've outgrown your spreadsheet?
Seven signs tell you it is time to move.
1. Entering transactions has become a chore you fall behind on. Every bank and card statement means exporting a CSV, cleaning up the columns, pasting it in and checking you haven't pasted the same week twice. When the routine slips from weekly to monthly to "I'll catch up at tax time," the spreadsheet is telling you something. A record that is three months stale can't help you decide anything.
2. You can't be sure the numbers are right. Spreadsheets have no built-in idea of an account balance, so nothing stops a double-entered row, a half-copied formula or a range that quietly stops one row short of your latest transaction. Research into real-world spreadsheets, notably the long-running work of Raymond Panko at the University of Hawaii, has found errors in a large share of the ones that get audited, and personal finance sheets are built by hand, often over years, with no review at all. If you've ever had a total that was out by an odd amount and spent an evening hunting for it, you've met this.
3. Categorising is all manual. Typing "Groceries" next to every supermarket line is tolerable at fifty transactions a month and miserable at three hundred. You can write lookup formulas or rules to automate it, but now you're maintaining a small piece of software, and every new merchant is an exception to it.
4. You can't see what's coming. A spreadsheet is very good at telling you what already happened. Knowing whether your account will dip below zero in three weeks, once the rent, the annual insurance and the quarterly bill have all landed, means building a forecast tab and keeping it in sync with reality. Most people never get round to it, so they find out the old-fashioned way.
5. Recurring bills live in your head. Subscriptions, direct debits, the annual renewal that always catches you out: none of them appear in a sheet until they've already been paid. Tracking them properly means a second list that someone has to remember to update.
6. More than one person needs it. The moment a partner wants to look, add a transaction or check the budget, the cracks show. Two people editing one file means "which version is current?", overwritten formulas and one person who doesn't dare touch it. Cloud-synced spreadsheets help, but they were designed for collaborating on a document, not for two people each keeping a ledger.
7. It's getting big. Excel's hard limit is 1,048,576 rows per sheet, and you will never hit it with personal transactions. You'll hit the practical limit long before: a file with ten years of history, a dozen tabs and a few thousand formulas gets slow to open, slow to recalculate and awkward to search. Nobody should be afraid to open their own finances.
If three or more of those sound familiar, the spreadsheet is costing you more time than it saves.
What do you give up when you leave a spreadsheet?
Mainly total flexibility, and it's worth being honest about that, because it's why people stay long after they should have moved.
- Total flexibility. A purpose-built app has opinions about how a transaction, a category or a budget works. Some of those won't match how you think.
- Your own formulas. If you've built an elaborate model of your finances, you won't get that exact model back.
- Zero-cost simplicity. A spreadsheet is free. A good finance app usually isn't.
- Control of your data. In a spreadsheet, the file is yours. In an online service you're trusting the provider, so check how it handles export and deletion before you commit.
None of these is a reason to stay, but they are reasons to pick the replacement deliberately instead of grabbing the first app that appears in a search.
What should you move to instead of a spreadsheet?
Broadly, you have four routes:
- A better spreadsheet. Tiller feeds your bank transactions into a Google or Excel sheet automatically. That solves the data-entry problem and keeps the flexibility, at the cost of still owning every formula and still being the one who fixes it when something breaks.
- A budgeting-first app. Monarch Money, YNAB and similar tools put the budget at the centre. They suit people who want a method or a guided way of working. They're less natural if what you wanted was a ledger.
- A desktop ledger. Quicken is the long-standing answer for people who want double-checked balances and deep history, with the subscription and complexity that come with it.
- A cloud ledger. The same model as the old desktop programs, with accounts, transactions, categories and payees, but online, with nothing to install and nothing to back up.
ThriftyOwl is in that last group. It keeps the thing a spreadsheet does well, a transaction-level record you can search and trust, and takes over the things a spreadsheet does badly. Balances are calculated for you instead of kept by formula. Recurring bills are set up once and appear as they fall due. Cash flow is forecast from those bills, so you can see a shortfall coming. Budgets track against your real categories, and you can share an account with a partner without sharing a file. It also imports your existing records instead of making you retype them: CSV files and Excel workbooks (.xlsx and .xls) from a spreadsheet or a bank export, and QIF files from an older program such as Microsoft Money.
It's priced as one flat subscription rather than a tier ladder, and it won't give you the infinite flexibility of a blank grid. If your spreadsheet is a genuine model, say with scenario planning or an unusual tax situation, keep it alongside. Most people with a spreadsheet, though, have really built a ledger by hand, and that's the job a ledger application does better.
Can you import your spreadsheet into ThriftyOwl?
Yes, as long as it is a list of transactions. ThriftyOwl imports CSV files and Excel workbooks under Account Settings → Import CSV and Account Settings → Import Excel. Each row should be one transaction with at least a date and an amount, and a header row helps.
You don't have to rearrange your columns first. ThriftyOwl reads your header names to find the date, the payee or description, the amount (or separate money-out and money-in columns), the category, a memo, a cheque or reference number and an account. It shows you what it found next to a preview of your rows, and nothing is imported until you've checked it. You can correct any column, choose the date format, and tick flip the sign if your sheet records spending as positive numbers.
A few things are worth knowing before you start:
- Workbooks with several tabs. Tick the sheets you want and each one comes across as its own account, named after its tab. Sheets that look like transaction lists are ticked for you, and each sheet can have its own columns. If you keep several accounts on one sheet, put the account name in an Account column instead.
- Several CSV files. If you have one export per year, put the files in a single .zip (or .rar) and upload that. They must all have exactly the same columns, and each file becomes an account named after the file.
- Only transactions import. A budget sheet, a net-worth tracker or a debt planner isn't a list of transactions, so it won't come across. You'll rebuild budgets in the app, which can then track them against your real categories.
- Nothing is guessed. A row without a readable date or amount is skipped rather than invented, so check the transaction count against your sheet afterwards.
How do you move without losing your history?
Export your raw data first, then bring across only the history you need.
- Export first. Keep an untouched copy of the file, and save a CSV of it if you like, so the raw data survives whatever happens next. ThriftyOwl can import either the CSV or the Excel file itself.
- Decide how much history you want. Most people need the current year and perhaps the previous one. Ten years of old transactions rarely earn their keep.
- Move one account first. Import your main current account with Import CSV or Import Excel, check the balance matches your bank, and only then bring the rest across. The free plan limits how many accounts you can have, so start with the ones that matter most.
- Reconcile before you trust it. If the opening balance and a recent statement balance agree, everything between them is very likely right. An imported spreadsheet account starts from a zero opening balance, so if your history doesn't go back to the account's first day the balance will be out by the amount you started with. Set the account's opening balance on its Edit page until it matches your bank.
- Keep the old file, read-only. Don't delete it. Use it as the reference for a couple of months, then archive it.
A spreadsheet stopped being enough for most people the first time they skipped a month of entries and didn't notice what it cost them. If that's you, you haven't failed at budgeting. You've outgrown a tool that was only ever meant to start you off.
About the author: Ian is the founder of ThriftyOwl.money. He built its Microsoft Money, CSV and Excel import tools himself and writes ThriftyOwl's white papers on the personal finance software industry.
Primary sources: Raymond R. Panko, "Spreadsheet Errors: What We Know. What We Think We Can Do"; Bradley and McDaid, "Error Estimation in Large Spreadsheets using Bayesian Statistics" (EuSpRIG 2009).
Sources: Microsoft, "Excel specifications and limits" (support.microsoft.com); Raymond R. Panko, University of Hawaii, spreadsheet error research (panko.com/ssr); Tiller product documentation (tillerhq.com); ThriftyOwl product documentation.