What the template looked like
One tab per month. In each tab, one column per category: food, transport, leisure, home, subscriptions. Rows for each day. At the bottom, a totals row and a pie chart with the month’s distribution. Another tab aggregated the year.
My favourite part was that chart. Every time I added an expense I saw the proportions update. It worked as a tiny immediate feedback: your money moved, this is what happened.
What worked
The template made me aware. Before it, my spending was a cloud. After, it was rows with amounts and dates. I went from “I don’t know where it goes” to “it goes on eating out twice a week”. That, on its own, already changed decisions.
It also helped me catch forgotten subscriptions. When you see “12.99 €” showing up on the same day for a year, you start asking what it is. I cancelled three services I had forgotten about.
Why I dropped it
Three reasons, in order of weight.
1. Logging weighed too much
Opening Excel on a phone —because I mostly logged from a phone— takes ten seconds. Finding the day’s row, five more. Type, save. Thirty seconds per entry. Not much on its own, but with three meals, two coffees and a grocery run, it adds up to five minutes of daily friction. And friction always wins.
2. Sync kept failing
I used Google Sheets to sync between laptop and phone. Once in a while rows duplicated or numbers disappeared. I once lost two weeks of data to a version conflict. After that, I stopped trusting it.
3. It did not work offline
When travelling —especially out of coverage— I had no expense app. I would log into a notes file and copy to Excel later. Which meant that half the time, I did not log.
What I do now
I switched to a local-first app: data lives on my device first, syncs automatically when I have internet, and I never lose anything. Logging is a three-second gesture. I still see the same pie chart, but I no longer fight with the spreadsheet format.
The app is Sumant, which I built. It is not the only option out there, but it is the one I designed for exactly this problem: how not to drop the habit in March.
When to keep Excel
If your spreadsheet works, do not change it. The best tool is the one you use. But if what happened to me happens to you —each expense becomes a tiny internal fight between “I log it” and “later”—, try something else. What does not work is to keep fighting the tool and blaming yourself.