How John finally found something that could replace the thing he'd spent a decade building. Here’s his story
I've had a spreadsheet for years. I love it, genuinely — the kind of love where you know every tab, every formula, every colour-coded cell so well that you check it three times a day. Minimum.
It grew the way these things always do. A tab added here for the mortgage. A rough column there for the pension. An increasingly heroic set of formulas trying to work out what next year looks like. Tax is in there somewhere too, sort of, in the way tax always ends up "sort of" handled in a spreadsheet nobody designed on purpose.
The problem isn't that it doesn't work. It does. The problem is that nobody else can open it.
My wife can't open it and understand what she's looking at. My kids certainly can't. It's a decade of private shorthand — brilliant, precise, and completely mine. If something happened to me, the thing I'd spent years building to protect our family's finances would be the one thing they couldn't use.
That's the thought that eventually made me look for something else.
The thing I was certain I'd lose
I'd looked at apps before and always bounced off them. They're rigid. My spreadsheet bends to exactly what I want — it asks the questions I actually have, not the questions someone else decided I should have.
The honest reason I hadn't switched was this: I was certain I'd lose the flexibility. Unless whatever replaced it was, in my own words, *infinitely* flexible, why give up the one thing that actually worked?
What changed my mind
I opened GiltEdge's Movements page and spent about ten minutes just looking at it.
A year-range slider to pick exactly the window I want. Category filter pills so I can isolate just pensions, or just savings, or just outgoings — whatever question I'm actually asking that day. A Monthly / Annual toggle so I can zoom from "what happened this month" to "what's the shape of the whole year" in one click. Everything broken down by category, by pot, exactly the way I'd built my spreadsheet to do.
Except none of it needed building.
And then, sitting quietly at the bottom of the page: a CSV download.
That was the moment. I didn't have to choose between a proper app and total control. I could see everything, filter everything, slice it exactly the way I always had — and if the itch to fiddle ever hit, the raw numbers were one click away, ready to drop straight back into a spreadsheet if I genuinely wanted to.
What's different now
The parts my old spreadsheet never quite got right — tax calculated properly, growth applied consistently every month rather than guessed at, a projection that actually runs itself forward instead of being manually dragged out another year — just work now, in the background, without me touching them.
And for the first time, there's something I can actually show my family. Not my spreadsheet with its ten years of private shorthand. A real picture. The kind anyone can look at and understand.
I still love a good spreadsheet. I just don't need to build one from scratch anymore.
