Cuéntamo vs Excel: app or spreadsheet?

Looking for an alternative to Excel?

If you are here, either Excel is not quite fitting or you are checking before you decide. This page will not try to talk you round: it says where Excel is better, where Cuéntamo is, and who each one suits. If your answer at the end is «I will stay where I am», that is a useful answer too.

What's genuinely good about Excel for your finances

Let's start with what's fair: a spreadsheet is a wonderful tool, and for many people it's more than enough. Its advantages are real and hard to beat:

• It's free (or nearly). Google Sheets and LibreOffice Calc cost nothing, and if you already have Office, Excel comes with it.
• Total flexibility and control. You build exactly what you want, with whatever columns, formulas and colours you fancy. Nobody decides for you.
• Your data, in your file. The .xlsx lives on your computer or in your Drive. You don't depend on a company staying in business.
• Works offline and never expires. A template you built ten years ago still opens today.

If you enjoy tinkering with formulas, your case is simple (a handful of transactions a month) and you already have your template set up just the way you like it, you don't need anything else. Really.

Where Excel falls short

The price of all that flexibility is that you do everything yourself, by hand. And that's where a spreadsheet starts to weigh on you:

• Constant upkeep. Every transaction gets typed in; every category gets assigned; every chart gets refreshed. One badly dragged formula and your balance lies to you without you noticing.
• No forecast — it only shows the past. Knowing how much you'll have in six months means building the whole recurring-payments projection yourself. Cuéntamo works it out on its own, up to 5 years ahead, and warns you before you hit the red. That's the whole point: it tells you how much money you'll have.
• No real statement imports. You can copy and paste, but then it's cleaning formats, dates and signs. Cuéntamo reads the CSV/Excel/ODS file from your bank or broker, matches the transactions and categorises them. (There's no automatic bank sync — you upload the file yourself, by privacy-first design.)
• Import without typing, without handing over your credentials. Besides file upload, you can use Habeas, a free local-first browser extension: you log in to your bank yourself and it reads your movements in your own browser, without your credentials or data ever passing through Cuéntamo or a third party. It doesn't (yet) connect to every bank and you use your own session, but it saves you typing without giving up your privacy.
• Awkward on your phone. Logging an expense in the supermarket queue from a spreadsheet is torture. An app is built for exactly that.

When to make the jump to an app

Cuéntamo is a web app and PWA (Android/iOS) for personal finances that automates exactly what you do by hand in Excel: automatic categorisation, balance forecasting, statement imports, expense splitting and debts, always-current charts, net worth, investments (with real multi-currency support), budgets and savings goals. It's private — it doesn't connect to your bank, shows no ads and doesn't sell your data — and it works on your phone. And if you freelance in Spain, there's a full Spanish tax module so you don't build VAT formulas in a sheet.

And here's the important part: there's no lock-in. You can import your Excel (CSV/XLS/XLSX/ODS) when you start and export all your data whenever you want. Just like a spreadsheet, your data stays yours; you simply stop maintaining it by hand.

The jump makes sense when the manual upkeep gets tiring, when you want to genuinely know where your balance is heading, or when you find yourself importing transactions often.