Have you ever worked really hard to build a sci-fi movie universe, only to see your first entry in the franchise derided by critics—who have never made a film in their lives—for its lack of originality and inferior comparisons to the (many) movies it takes as inspiration? I’m not going to defend Rebel Moon, but I can understand how Zack Snyder must feel.
So in the spirit of defending misunderstood artists everywhere (also not saying Zack Snyder is that), here are my rebuttals to the top 3 most common complaints about the Excel At Money Spending Tracker. Don’t see your complaint on the list? Let us know in the comments below!! 🙃
1. “I have to manually download my bank data each month.”
Okay, yeah, I grant that’s a little annoying. But what’s the alternative? Constantly re-syncing your bank accounts every time your bank updates its security protocols or you change your password?
Once you get familiar with where to download your transactions for each of your accounts, the entire download process can easily take five minutes or less. That’s essentially how long it would take to resolve your syncing issues once a month if you entrusted your financial accounting to one of the BSTCs (Big Spending Tracker Companies).
And that’s IF you’re able to resolve them. Why do you think I started developing this tool? You think I WANTED to expend months of free labor and neglect my child’s formative years to build the freest, most customizable spending tracker ever? It’s because I couldn’t get Mint (R.I.P.) to sync with my dumb Capital One accounts. If a tool already existed that did everything I needed it to, Excel At Money would never have been born.
Also, data privacy. Do you really feel comfortable giving these companies access to your personal data? What do you think they’re doing with the entirety of your financial data—not looking at it? If you’re not paying for a service in money, you’re paying for it in data. Because the Excel At Money Spending Tracker lives entirely on your computer and no account information is exchanged, I have zero access to your spending patterns. Excel At Money is 100% not-profitable, so you can rest assured you’re getting more out of this than I am.
2. “My auto-categorizations aren’t perfect.”
Um, how was my application supposed to know that the rice you bought at Whole Foods was intended to revive your toilet-submerged iPhone and not for personal consumption? AI can’t read your mind (yet), so don’t be surprised when your spending tracker misclassifies the intent behind one of your purchases.
“But it thought Sephora was a restaurant.”
Alright, I’ll level with you. The spending tracker employs a relatively simple machine learning algorithm to predict which category applies to each of your purchases. If you stop by Sephora for hair ties and a free makeover—when you’ve historically used Ulta for that purpose—the tool may blindly guess that Sephora is a restaurant because it doesn’t have Sephora in its training data. Once you correct the misclassification, future Sephora raids should be accurately categorized.
My approach to categorization is better, I might add, than rules-based applications that simply assign categories to vendors. The Excel At Money Spending Tracker uses the vendor, amount, and date of the transaction – pretty much all of the data available – to make an informed guess about the purchase intent. So it will know that the big Costco purchase is groceries, and the little one right afterwards is the food court.
And for those of you who are about to point out that ChatGPT would know all of this out of the box, I’ll counter that 1) you’re probably right; and 2) OpenAI is not nearly as altruistic as I am, and using its API for this product would make it no longer free.
Besides, forcing you to physically review your data for accuracy is a feature, not a bug, in my view. You don’t want a system that promotes complacency and discourages you from ever looking at your transactions. The monthly accounting ritual should be a time of reflection—a time to ponder your spending decisions and contemplate whether every meal really has to be washed down with a caffeinated beverage. You’re not going to get that level of insight or granularity from an aggregated report instantly delivered to you with no investment on your end.
3. “It’s slow.”
“This free application is too manual. This free application is too slow.” That’s what you sound like right now.
There are, admittedly, certain operations that consume more time than I would like—namely, the import and deploy functions. The max processing time depends on your combination of operating system and Excel version; but in some cases, it could take 1-2 minutes for either one to complete. (FWIW, Excel 365 cuts down the processing time considerably.)
Presumably, you’ll be doing this on your computer once a month and can think of something to do in the meantime. Like watch a K-pop music video or something. I recommend this one.
But how about this? Rather than complain about every perceived flaw or quirk in the application, let’s take a step back to appreciate the fact that Excel has been converted into personal finance software that rivals the functionality of a commercial product. One of the tradeoffs for the ultimate customizability afforded by building in Excel is reduced processing speed. There are no free lunches here.
Speaking of customizability, I’ve made all of the code accessible. So if you have some brilliant idea for how to optimize the code and make it really hum, have at it 😉
In conclusion, the Excel At Money Spending Tracker is not perfect, but it’s the best I could do given limited resources, conflicting obligations, and a budget of $0. If you’re not satisfied with this product, just send us an email and we’ll grant you a full refund, no questions asked.
Oh yeah. It’s free.
nice post