Microsoft has introduced a new function called Money in Excel, specially designed to help users who use Excel to manage their personal or family finances.
Money in Excel is a template with an Excel plugin that allows Microsoft 365 subscribers to connect securely to bank accounts, as well as to credit cards and other data, such as loans, for example. The result is a bunch of account information right on a spreadsheet.
Yes, for it to be used, you must be a subscriber of Microsoft 365 Personal or Family, and reside in the United States, since the agreements they have currently only work in that country. For it to work in other places, you will have to ask for permissions and obey specific privacy policies of each region. The template can be found at this link.
Just download the template to start connecting bank accounts through the Plaid connector. That’s an easy thing in the United States, since most major financial institutions are compliant with this standard. Once the connection is made, the account transactions will be automatically imported into the desired file.
The advantage is that transactions are classified to facilitate the analysis of how we spend money, something similar to the graphs that we already obtain in our bank’s apps, but with much more detail and without assuming many things.
It also has alerts for increases in subscription rates, expenses related to bank charges and more, and it is capable of automatically generating tables of recurring expenses, or a monthly snapshot of those expenses.
Microsoft already had Microsoft Money, but it has been shut down 10 years ago. Then I presented an app called MSN Money, but without much success. It seems that now they could be right by not having to use anything but the old acquaintance excel.
