vsComparison
Not Pato vs Excel
A spreadsheet is free, flexible and does exactly what you tell it. The problem was never Excel: it is that you have to feed it by hand every day, and almost nobody keeps that up past three weeks.
March, day by day
Your spreadsheet
18 days never logged
Not Pato
0 days never logged
Nobody quits the spreadsheet because it is bad. They quit on a random Tuesday.
The spreadsheet does not lose on merit. It loses because it depends on you feeding it every single day.
If you track your spending in a spreadsheet, you already won the hard part: you have the habit of looking at your money. Most people never get that far.
The question is not which tool is better in the abstract, it is what happens on the day you are tired and skip the three expenses you made. In a spreadsheet, that day leaves a hole. A week later there are seven holes, and the month is no longer good enough to decide anything with. That is the only difference that matters, and no extra column fixes it.
Everything else (categories, budgets, charts) Excel does, and with more freedom than any app.
Side by side
Go with Not Pato if
- You already tried the spreadsheet and dropped it after three weeks.
- You have accounts at more than one bank and credit cards with installments.
- You want to check the month on your phone without opening a laptop.
- It helps you to be told before a payment slips past you.
Go with Excel if
- You need your own calculations that no app is going to give you.
- You have kept your spreadsheet for years and it costs you no effort.
- You do not want to connect your bank to any service, full stop.
- Your case is unusual: a business, several currencies with their own rules, splitting costs between partners.