A ledger that checks itself, or a grid you check by hand

For books you have to trust, usually yes; for a small, simple cash log, not necessarily. Beancount is a double-entry ledger: every transaction must balance or the file refuses to load, balance assertions prove each account against your bank statement, and the whole history is plain text you can diff in Git. Excel and Google Sheets are blank grids — flexible and familiar, but a broken formula or a mistyped cell fails silently. Once you have several accounts, investments, more than one currency, or an accountant and a tax filing relying on the numbers, a ledger that checks itself is the safer record.

Yes. Export the transactions sheet as CSV (File → Download → CSV in Google Sheets, Save As → CSV in Excel) with one row per transaction: date, description, amount and category. Map each category to a Beancount account such as Expenses:Office or Income:Consulting, convert the CSV in your browser with beancount.io's free CSV-to-Beancount tool, preview the balanced entries, then add balance assertions at each month-end statement date so the new ledger proves it matches your bank.

Keep the spreadsheet if you are a solo freelancer or side business with a few dozen cash transactions a month and one bank account, if what you really need is a budget or a what-if model rather than books, if non-technical colleagues must co-edit the same sheet live today, or if you do not want to learn a text syntax. For those readers a well-built bookkeeping workbook is the right tool. If you are deciding whether to leave spreadsheets for accounting software in general, start with our warning-signs checklist rather than this product comparison.

Yes, and a more complete one if you keep the ledger in Git. Because a Beancount ledger is a plain-text file, Git gives you a line-by-line diff of every change, who made it and why, and the ability to revert any edit, with no cap on how many versions you keep. Google Sheets' cell edit history can omit row and column inserts, formatting and formula-driven changes and needs edit access to view; Excel's version history works only for files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint, and a personal account keeps the last 25 versions.

Beancount and its Fava web interface are free and open source, and you need no Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace licence to use them — a text editor is enough. beancount.io's optional paid plans add hosting, bank sync and mobile apps, not access to your data. For comparison, as of September 2026 Google Sheets is free with a personal Google account, Google Workspace Business Starter lists at $7 per user per month, and Microsoft 365 Business Basic is $7 and Business Standard $14 per user per month in the US.