What do you love about spreadsheets for tracking your financial life?

Discussion
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Just for fun, what do you love about spreadsheets for tracking your finances?

Is it flexibility? Or collaboration? Or is it a feature you find essential, like pivot tables? (Or emoji? :slightly_smiling_face:)

Share your thoughts in the tread below. It will be fun to see what everyone says!

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I recently wrote a longwinded post about why modern spreadsheets are better than apps for tracking your financial life.

Along the way, I ran out of space to mention why I personally prefer spreadsheets:

  • Every several weeks I get an urge to dig deeper into my numbers. With Google Sheets, I can fully immerse myself in this task.

  • Google Sheets + Tiller Money Feeds is the easiest yet most engaging way to track the everyday money metrics I care about most (daily spending, cash flow, net worth).

  • I love the flexibility of Google Sheets. For example, I created a warped spreadsheet that logs how I spend my money each day, everything I eat, the local weather, and (until recently) my daily steps and heart rate. This spreadsheet is basically a daily journal tracking how I literally “spent” my past few years.

Why do you prefer spreadsheets to manage your money?

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Ugh. I cannot imagine having to go back to an app. Please don’t make me!

For me, it’s flexibility. I am not shoehorned into some developer’s idea of what I might want. Tiller, to me, is like a beer tap. My spreadsheet is my very own my-name-on-it beer mug. I fill it up and then I can do whatever I am smart enough to do with it.

I have backup versions saved whenever I want and where ever I want. I can twiddle and tweak and screw around with my data and if I break something, I can fix it easily. I have learned so much about spreadsheets from Tiller. And there is so much more I can do if I figure out how.

I am your basic old retired person cliche. I obsess over money management. Using a spreadsheet just fills my obsession with the joy of control over every teensy bit of financial data.

I’ve used all the apps over the years and if I had to go back, I’d export the info into a spreadsheet every day!

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Definitely emoijs :laughing:

But in all seriousness, before Tiller Money there was a period in my life where I was living paycheck to paycheck and used a basic Excel spreadsheet for a bit to get me through that period. I think it was the easiest way to really see what I needed to see to help me feel confident about my choices around money and trust I was going to get through that time in my life. After that when money wasn’t tight I didn’t use anything until finding Tiller Money.

It’s not any one feature for me, it’s that I have the data at my finger tips in a format that allows me to play with it however I want or build whatever I want on top of it.

It’s interesting and funny too because in college I actually failed the Excel part of the Microsoft Office Suite course and testing JMU made us do and had to retake it.

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