Regardless of where you are in the world—whether it be Mumbai, India or New York City, New York—personal budgets were largely completed on computer spreadsheets—personal finance in excel was by far the most popular option—before technology made things simple and the widespread use of online services.
It’s time to reevaluate whether personal finance in Excel, including all variations of family budget worksheets, financial planning spreadsheets, and any other offerings of managing money in Excel, has had its day now that apps and technology have made so many things easier, accessible, and convenient online, including managing budgets online.
The Advantages of Using Excel to Manage Your Personal Finances The most obvious advantage is that the calculations are done by a formula processor, making it easy to repeat, paste, and copy the process of adding up numbers and making calculations.
That much is obvious, and anyone who can write a basic formula can create a variety of complex Excel family budget worksheets. Even though it takes a lot of time to create the formulas and format the financial spreadsheet as you build it, ease of creation is a major benefit.
Another advantage of using an Excel budgeting worksheet is that it may be free—certainly, if you put in the time to complete it yourself. However, many people look for free family budget worksheets or spreadsheets because creating family budgets isn’t exactly a fun day out.
These fully formatted and formulaic products are almost always created by someone else online and distributed or sold for free.
The Issue with Managing Your Personal Finances in Excel The issue with managing your personal finances in Excel is simply that!
It is only useful on a laptop or personal computer because no one wants to stare at a finance spreadsheet or worksheet on their phone while squinting. Also, the time it takes to personalize these standard Excel financial worksheets can be wasted if something goes wrong, like a formula not matching, or if everything gets clogged up and the numbers and columns don’t match.
Unless you have professional Excel training, recovering a corrupted formula is extremely difficult.
Additionally, personal finance in Excel can only be used for basic calculations, making it difficult to apply it to a wider range of budgetary decisions. Excel-created personal finance worksheets can only be used for one purpose. Localized PC or laptop loss, malware, spyware, or identity theft from an unsecure system are all obvious threats.
Downloading free financial excel spreadsheets carries a very real risk because they are frequently offered in promotions as a means of collecting personal information, concealing shipping costs, or luring you into purchasing something significantly more expensive later.
You will never be able to tell for sure whether you have installed OEM software or illegal pirate copies. You can’t tell if these localized personal finance spreadsheets contain malware, spyware, or tracking cookies to steal your data.
The enticing advantages of online personal finance.
Online money management offers many of the advantages of finance in Excel without any of the disadvantages.
Actually, the only issue with it is not really an issue at all. It costs more than free, but it comes with dedicated support, never crashes, you can’t lose it, someone else has to keep the connections up, and a bunch of employed people are 100% focused on making it work.
There are no issues during installation, extra costs, or personalised errors. They make it very simple to use, access, and maintain the best encryption software that safeguards security.
Online financial budgeting can even be fun and save money. Choose one that either uses your information anonymously with your permission to find you really cheap deals and opportunities to save money without over-spamming you.
Personal finance software that can be accessed online is, in my opinion, the only option. It is far superior to personal finance software that can be accessed in Excel, which, to be honest, is decades out of date and not at all convenient.
Consider this: If I’m going to put in the time to create a family budget, which is an essential part of mastering money, why wouldn’t I want to benefit from a finance online service that finds cheaper prices on my behalf? Why not go back and do all that searching myself?
Online personal finance management must be simple, right?
