Why I stopped tracking money in Excel

This is a personal account. For the structural reasons Excel fails at finance, see Why finance spreadsheets stop working.

I built my Excel finance tracker in early 2021. It had tabs for every month, a summary sheet with SUMIF formulas, a category breakdown, even a little cash flow chart I was proud of. For about eight months, it worked.

Then I updated the January tab structure to add a new “Subscriptions” category. The SUMIF on the summary sheet broke silently. For three months, my category totals were wrong and I didn't notice — because the numbers looked plausible.

The maintenance problem nobody talks about

Personal finance spreadsheets have a structural problem that isn't about formulas. It's about time. Every month, I needed to: duplicate the previous tab, rename it, clear the transaction rows, verify the formulas still worked, and reset the running totals. This took 15–20 minutes per month.

Over three years, that's roughly 10 hours of spreadsheet maintenance. Hours spent not analysing my finances — but preparing the tool to let me analyse them. That's the hidden cost.

The mobile problem

The spreadsheet worked fine on my laptop. On my phone — where I actually spend money — it was nearly unusable. Opening the app, navigating to the right tab, scrolling to the right row, tapping the right cell in a tiny grid. By the time I got through the sequence, I'd sometimes forgotten the amount.

So I started batching: logging expenses at the end of the day, then the end of the week, then “when I have time.” The tracker stopped reflecting reality. The numbers became fiction.

What actually broke it

The specific moment I stopped: I noticed my December summary showed £340 spent on “Food” when I knew I'd hosted three dinners that month and spent closer to £600. I traced it back to November, when I'd reorganised the columns. The formula range was still pointing to the old structure.

Three years of data. Months of it unreliable. The file felt like a document — not a financial record.

What I found instead

I wanted something that did the structural work for me — automatic monthly history, no formula maintenance, mobile-first entry, and recurring bill forecasting. I also didn't want to connect my bank. The manual discipline was a feature: logging a purchase consciously made me think about it.

FinTrack gave me exactly that. The recurring bills I entered in the first week still work automatically two years later. The mobile interface takes under five seconds per transaction. And the “Safe to Spend” number — current balance minus all upcoming unpaid bills — answers the one question I was always trying to calculate manually in Excel.