Excel versus Recurring
How long did it take for you to learn your first Excel formula? Do you recall the workshops it took to get to Excel level 3? Advanced enough courses to be able to create graphs and pie charts. This Excel versus Recurring article will compare the pros and cons of using Excel versus Recurring as expense tracking software, exclusively.
For that, we’ll start by defining what each platform is. And then give you the pros and cons list as we see it. This is all to give you an idea of how to use expense tracking software to help your ideas, companies, and projects.
What is Recurring
Recurring is an expense tracking platform, which can be used as online software from any browser. It’s a tool designed to optimize a company or individual’s financial needs and create savings. This applies especially so for startups and entrepreneurs.
How to get started with Recurring
Once you’re at Recurring’s home page, enter an email address. A confirmation email will be sent to the registered address. From there, click on a link and you’ll be verified to start using the software. Just keep that initial tab open until you’ve clicked on your email link for the platform to work optimally.
The organization setup
Enter your company name to get a Recurring address. With just this step, you can keep track of invoices. All it takes is for you or your stakeholders to forward those to the customized company address at Recurring for your business.
An example of how Recurring works
So, for Joey’s Car Wash, let's say, Recurring will automatically create a joey’scarwashemailaddress@recurring.co. You and anyone in your company (or not) can use it to forward invoices and file for expenses. The tool is designed to automatically keep track of those that way. Beautiful practical centralization, don’t you think?
Newcomers get to activate their accounts by forwarding a first email invoice to that address.
That Uber ride your team member needs from the airport far away from you? Just ask them to forward that bill to the customized email address at Recurring and watch the tool document all this for you.
Invoices take but a few minutes to appear in your company dashboard. Yet, you can also set up auto-forwarding. Here are our CEO’s step-by-step instructions to set up email auto-forwarding on Recurring on the most popular email clients.
What’s Excel?
On the other hand, Excel is also a program that can be downloaded from the Internet (or a similar version used online through Google Sheets, for example - a reduced version of the Excel primer.) More than anything, Excel functions as a spreadsheet.
Now that we’re on those, take a look at Slidebean’s ultimate financial model template for startups; a spreadsheet built by founders, for founders. We mention it because you’re interested in this topic and this is ultimately the one spreadsheet Slidebean has used for 5+ years to manage a (profitable) operation. And it’s become the backbone of our operations management.
But, back to Excel, you could consider that software to be the most magnificent example of what a dynamic spreadsheet can do. It’s part of the most common programs to which almost everyone in the world can relate. Yet, it’s questionable how many people can truly master the tool to get it to its maximum potential with the diverse calculations, sheet and workbook relations, graphing tool capabilities, use of pivot tables, and so much more!
In all fairness, the comparison is odd
In some ways, it’s even kind of hard to compare Excel to anything that goes beyond a calculating spreadsheet, to be honest. Recurring simply does so much more!
Have you ever heard of Excel offering a customized email address to enter your data onto their sheets and workbooks, for example?
With Excel, you can calculate formulas, create spreadsheets, copy those between books, even work online with people who also handle the tool via Google Docs. It’s a very famous program that’s easily known by almost everyone on the planet.
Yet, beyond your calculations, Recurring also relies on artificial intelligence to allow users to forward invoices to a dedicated address or upload them to the tool directly. You can also classify tools by team and expense category and view all changes within the platform under monthly billing.
Measure historical spending by team member, category, and platform, for example. The difference between Excel versus Recurring in the sense of spending is that Recurring as a SaaS tool will have automated all of these algorithms and coding for you to be able to extract results in a fully user-friendly way. With Excel, all these interactions require considerable programming if you’d like to store records and track expenses by hand.
While this is all information an Excel master can code, other features are simply absent from a calculating spreadsheet that is more of a given in any expense tracking tool.
Take email and desktop notifications as a clear example. Recurring notifies about charges and changes in subscriptions. It'll link dates and platforms and send email notifications as programmed. This helps keep an eye on what we sign up for. Or what team members use and what they don’t. So far, Excel offers no similar integrated tracking system for internal expenses for startups.
The same applies to our multi-currency support. Our tool will automatically detect multiple currencies straight from your receipts. And it’ll let you switch between currencies to whichever you choose to work with.
Excel offers plenty of options as to the data we can enter and what we can produce with it. That's by no means a small reach. Yet, that tool requires we manually feed information to it to get it to produce what works best for us. It can make accurate calculations and come up with data presentations the way we need them. Yet, we need to know how to work around those commands and options.
Get better acquainted with Recurring
We hope this Excel versus Recurring comparison has helped differ what Recurring can do as a SaaS tool and expense tracker versus Excel’s brilliant reach as a spreadsheet.
If you’re up for a live onboarding session of our tool, just book your time with us. We’re glad we can be here for you.
And please remember, glitches on Recurring should be very rare. Yet, you can always just email our support team by contacting support@recurring.co. Thanks for being here; your feedback is our priority right now.