Budget spreadsheet vs Bufin

What stays the same

Cost: both are free. Ownership: your Bufin files sit in your own Google Drive, the same place your spreadsheet does, and export to Excel or JSON on demand. Nobody else's servers hold your history in either case.

What Bufin adds

• Recurring bills that schedule themselves and land on a calendar instead of being re-typed every month.
• A phone interface built for entering a coffee in four taps, rather than a spreadsheet grid on a small screen.
• Budget progress, cash-flow charts, savings rate, net worth over time, and debt-payoff plans without writing a formula.
• Receipt and statement scanning, and CSV import that skips duplicates.

When to keep the spreadsheet

If your budget's value is in a model only you could design: an unusual pay structure, a business ledger, an allocation you've tuned for years: no app will fit better than the thing you built. Bufin makes the common shape effortless, not the bespoke one possible. Plenty of people run both: the spreadsheet for the model, Bufin for the day-to-day.