For most people who track their money at all, the competition is not another app. It is a spreadsheet they already have, that costs nothing, that nobody else can see, and that does exactly what they told it to. Any argument for an app that does not start by taking that seriously is a sales pitch. So: where the spreadsheet genuinely wins, and what an app has to be worth to displace it.
A spreadsheet wins on cost, privacy, flexibility and permanence, and it will still be readable in twenty years. It loses on one thing only, and it is decisive for most people: you have to enter the data. Manual entry has an abandonment rate close to total, and a perfectly designed sheet that stops being updated in week three is worth less than a crude automatic log that keeps running. If you are the rare person who genuinely maintains a manual sheet, keep it — you do not need an app.
It is free and it is permanent. No subscription, no company that can shut down, no migration when it does. Mint’s users found out in March 2024 what depending on a free product from someone else’s business is worth — the Mint page covers what happened. A CSV you own will open in fifty years.
Nobody else can see it. No inbox access, no SMS permission, no bank login, no third party holding a view of your financial life. This is a real advantage and no app can match it, only mitigate it.
It does exactly what you want. Your categories, your rules, your definition of what counts as savings. Every app imposes a taxonomy, and every taxonomy is wrong for somebody. A sheet has no opinion.
It is a better calculator than most apps. Modelling a prepayment, a rent-versus-buy decision or a FIRE date is genuinely easier in a spreadsheet than in any app’s fixed screens. Which is partly why the calculators here are free and ungated — that job does not need an account.
Manual entry. Not because it is difficult but because it is a daily discipline with no immediate reward, competing against everything else in your day. Almost everyone who starts a spending sheet stops, usually within a month, and usually while still believing they will get back to it. The sheet is not the problem. The data pipeline into it is.
This matters more than it sounds because the value of spending data is almost entirely in its continuity. A month of records tells you very little; twelve months tells you what your actual life costs, which is the number every other financial decision depends on — the FIRE target, the affordable rent, the honest savings rate. A record with gaps cannot produce that.
Automatic capture for the log, spreadsheet for the thinking. Let something else keep the running record of what left your account, and export it when you want to model something properly. The failure mode is not using a spreadsheet — it is asking yourself to be the data entry layer.
If it costs money, the automation has to be worth more than the money and more than what you hand over to get it. That is a genuinely high bar and it is worth applying strictly. Three questions:
TLDR Money reads the transaction alerts and statements your bank already emails you, so the log maintains itself without asking for a net-banking password or SMS permission. It is a subscription, which means the honest pitch is narrow: it is worth paying for if and only if automatic capture is the thing standing between you and a continuous record. If you have kept a manual sheet running for two years, it is not for you, and that is a fine outcome.
Export is not optional in that arrangement. A tracker you cannot leave is worse than the spreadsheet it replaced.
Yes, if you actually maintain it. A spreadsheet is free, private, flexible and permanent, and it models scenarios better than most apps. The problem is not capability but sustained manual entry, which almost everyone abandons within a month or two — and spending data is only useful when it is continuous.
Capture transactions without you typing them. That is essentially the whole difference. Everything else a tracker does — categorising, budgeting, charts, net worth — can be built in a spreadsheet by anyone willing to build it. Automatic capture cannot be, because the data has to come from somewhere outside the sheet.
It depends entirely on what the app asks for. Net-banking credentials are the highest-risk access, SMS inbox permission on Android is broad, and email or notification parsing is narrower. Read what the app requests and why, and check how the company earns — a tracker owned by a lender has a commercial interest in your borrowing capacity.
That is usually the best arrangement. Let an app maintain the automatic log, and export to a spreadsheet when you want to model something specific like a prepayment or a rent-versus-buy decision. The thing worth avoiding is being the manual data-entry layer yourself.
A workable one needs categories that match Indian spending, a UPI-heavy transaction structure, and separate handling for EMIs so debt service is not mixed in with discretionary spending. The structure matters much less than whether you keep filling it in, which is the honest reason most templates end up abandoned.
TLDR Money maintains the log from the alerts already in your inbox and lets you export all of it whenever you want. No bank login, no SMS permission, no commission on anything you own.
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Facts on this page verified 5 August 2026. Anything about another company changes without notice; if something here is out of date, tell us at [email protected] and it gets corrected.
This is an explanation, not advice about your money. TLDR Money is not a registered investment adviser and earns no commission on any product mentioned. Where another company is described, the description reflects publicly available information on the date above and may since have changed.