A spreadsheet never reports an error

What is good about a spreadsheet

It is yours, it sits on your own machine, and it does whatever you write into it. No sign-up, no subscription, no format anyone can take away from you. If you keep one and you are happy with it, you have no reason to switch, and none of what follows is aimed at you.

The mistakes nobody sees

A spreadsheet calculates what is there, and a wrong total looks exactly like a right one.

• The range of the formula. You add a row at the bottom, and the sum above still reaches to the old last row. The new transaction is missing from every report, and nothing points at it.
• The month pasted twice. The statement goes in a second time because it was unclear whether it was already there. Twenty transactions now count double.
• Categories drifting apart. In January it reads "groceries", in October "food", and in the yearly comparison they are two categories. Work without a dropdown and you get this over the years, guaranteed.
• The credit card. Pour a bank statement and a card statement into the same sheet and the card spending counts twice. That is the most common silent mistake of all, and it has a page of its own.

Each of these is small on its own. Together they make the figure at the end of the year a claim you can no longer check without recalculating everything.

The evening every month

The second point is the work. A spreadsheet does not fill itself: download the statement, paste it in, sort the columns, assign every row to a category. With two accounts and a credit card that is an evening a month.

As long as you enjoy it, that is no problem. Most household budgets fail exactly there, though: not on the idea, but on three months you let slide and would now have to catch up.

Once the workbook is a few years old

A young spreadsheet is easy to read. After five years it has a tab per year, formulas pointing at other tabs, and at least one cell where someone typed a value over the formula because the formula no longer fitted.

From there every question that spans years turns into manual work. What has happened to fixed costs since 2022? Which category has grown? In a workbook with a tab per year you answer that by copying and pasting, and you do it again every time.

What an app has over a spreadsheet

The obvious answer would be privacy, and it does not hold here: your spreadsheet already sits on your own machine. Moving from a local file to a local app gains you nothing in confidentiality, and moving to a cloud service costs you some. The difference lies elsewhere.

• An import instead of the evening. The file from your online banking is read as it is. You map the columns once, and after that the app recognises the same format.
• Transactions sort themselves. Whatever was assigned once stays assigned. For the rest there are keyword rules and, where Apple Intelligence is available, a suggestion for what no rule catches.
• Duplicates are caught. Put the same statement in a second time and anything already there is skipped and reported.
• Categories are a list, not free text. "Groceries" and "food" cannot grow up beside each other.
• Years live in one table. Comparing several of them is a view rather than an afternoon.

What a spreadsheet keeps in return: you can build anything in it. An app gives you the reports it was built with, and no others.

What happens to your old data

This is where an honest answer belongs. A grown budget workbook cannot simply be carried over: it has a structure only you know, with tabs, subtotals and special cases. No import reads that reliably.

The route is a different one. You fetch your bank statements again and import those. How far back that gets you depends on the bank; one to two years is usual, some go further. Your old workbook stays where it is and keeps answering everything from before.

Which also means the first reports are thin until enough months are in. A year-on-year comparison needs two years, and at the start you do not have them.

How Parendi does it

Parendi grew out of exactly such a workbook: a tab for every year, formulas nobody followed any more, and that evening every month. The numbers therefore calculate the way they calculated in the spreadsheet, down to the rounding.

Statements come in as CSV, Excel files or camt.053, transactions sort themselves, and the reports are there straight away: spending per category, fixed costs, savings rate, net worth. All of it sits in one file on your Mac, the way the spreadsheet did. The whole story, or the features in detail.