Excel and Google Sheets are impressive tools. They are flexible, free, and there is a ready-made template for almost any topic. That is exactly why most ambitious financial planners end up there eventually.
And that is exactly why so many of them fail there too.
What Excel does well
Before we criticise: Excel is brilliant in the right hands. A short list:
- Maximum flexibility: every cell can mean anything. You can build your logic exactly the way you want it.
- No vendor lock-in: your data belongs to you, in a format that will still be readable 20 years from now.
- One-off quick check: if you just want to simulate a savings-plan return over 30 years once, a simple table is enough.
Where Excel hits its limits
As soon as you want to plan regularly instead of calculating once, problems show up — and they show up systematically:
1. Error rates
A wrong cell reference, a shifted range, a forgotten column. Studies on spreadsheet errors show: nearly 90% of all more complex spreadsheets contain at least one substantial error. In personal finance no one notices — except at the end, when reality looks different from the table.
2. No future visualisation
Excel can draw you charts. But hardly anyone builds a truly continuous wealth-future line over 30 years that combines all accounts, investments, life events and scenarios. It almost always stops at isolated savings-plan or mortgage calculators.
3. No emotional decision support
An Excel cell that says “€234,812” feels like a tax notice. A line curving upwards in front of your eyes feels like progress. Personal money questions are also about motivation — and this is exactly where tables deliver very little.
4. Setup effort and maintenance
Building a reasonable personal-finance sheet takes 5–20 hours. Maintaining it, another 30 minutes a month. When life changes (a move, a child, a job change), the logic often needs to be rethought. People who stop once rarely come back.
What a modern alternative has to do
If Excel is the baseline, then a good financial-planning tool has to be better in four points:
- Fast setup: in minutes, not hours. Your own picture of finances has to emerge in a single session.
- Real future visualisation: a wealth timeline that integrates all building blocks — and changes live with your assumptions.
- What-if scenarios: what happens when you buy a house? Start a family? Take a sabbatical? These comparisons are painful in Excel — one click in a good tool.
- Less maintenance: you plan your life — not your spreadsheet.
Complement Excel, don't replace it
We are not against Excel. It remains the best tool for one-off, precise, custom calculations. But for the ongoing planning of your financial future — the thing that really makes the difference over decades — there are better tools today.
That's exactly why we built Planora. You don't have to choose: keep using Excel for your detailed calculations — and have a tool in parallel that shows you the big picture.