Personal finance online or personal finance in Excel?

Wherever you are in the world, be it New York City, New York or Mumbai, India, before technology made things easy and before the explosive use of online services, personal budgets if they were done at all, was largely done on computer spreadsheets. , and by far the most popular choice was personal finance in Excel.

Now that apps and technology have made so many things easier, more accessible and more convenient online, including managing budgets online, it’s time to reconsider whether personal finances in Excel are past its prime, including all variations of family budget worksheets, financial spreadsheets. planning or any other offers for managing money in excel.

The benefits of managing personal finances in Excel

The most obvious advantage is that calculations are done by a formula processor, so the mechanics of adding and making calculations can be automated and can be easily repeated, pasted and copied.

That’s obvious, and all kinds of extended versions of family budget worksheets in Excel can be created by anyone who can write a basic formula. So the ease of creation is a big advantage, even though it takes a lot of time to create the formulas and format the financial spreadsheet while you are creating it.

Another advantage of managing a budget worksheet in Excel is that it can be free, it will certainly be free if you invest the hard hours doing it yourself. However, since making family budgets isn’t exactly a fun day out in the first place, many people look for free family budget worksheets or spreadsheets.

These products are invariably made online by someone else and sold or given away for free – fully formatted and formal.

The problem with managing personal finances in Excel

However, the problem with personal finance in Excel is just that – personal finance in Excel!

It’s on a personal computer or laptop and hasn’t been used much on a smartphone – no one wants to sit squinting at a financial worksheet or spreadsheet on a phone. Also, the time it takes to personalize these standard financial worksheets in Excel can be wasted with a little mistake, an accidental deletion, formula mismatches and everything crashes and numbers and columns mismatch.

It is incredibly difficult to repair a damaged formula unless you are professionally trained in Excel.

Also, personal finance in Excel is limited to basic calculations and cannot really be easily integrated into a wider range of financial budget decisions. Every personal financial worksheet created in Excel is for a single purpose, not multiple uses. An obvious danger is the local loss of the PC, laptop or an attack by viruses or malware – spyware and identity theft from an unsecured system.

A very real danger in downloading free financial Excel spreadsheets is that they are so often given away in promotions, as ways to collect personal information, or include hidden shipping costs, or push you to buy something much more expensive later on.

You can never be sure if you bought or loaded pirated copies or OEM software. These localized personal finance spreadsheets may even contain malware, spyware, or tracking cookies to steal your data – you just don’t know it.

The Explosive Benefits of Personal Finance Online.

Managing money online has many of the benefits of finance in Excel without the drawbacks.

The only problem with it is actually no problem at all. It costs more than free – but comes with dedicated service, it never crashes, you can’t lose it, someone else has to maintain the connections and some employees are 100% focused on making it work and work well.

There are no installation problems, hidden costs or personal mistakes. The best ones have encryption software to protect the security, they make it very easy to use, access and maintain.

Online budgeting  can even be fun  and money-saving. Choose one that pays back a user dividend or uses your data anonymously with your permission to find you really cheap deals and money-saving opportunities without spamming you to death.

Personally, I think that online personal finance software is the only way to go, much better than personal finance in Excel, which frankly is decades out of date and not useful at all.