Excel vs Google Sheets for Small Business Finances

The short answer, if you want to stop reading: for a solo operator or a business with a handful of people, keeping ordinary books, Google Sheets is the better default — it is free, it collaborates without configuration, and nothing about bookkeeping needs Excel’s power features. Choose Excel if you already pay for Microsoft 365, if your accountant works in it, if you handle tens of thousands of rows, or if you need pivot tables and Power Query as a routine part of the job.

The longer answer is about how each one fails, because that is what you actually live with.

Prices, limits and behaviours below were checked against Microsoft and Google’s own documentation in August 2026. Vendors change all of these; check before you commit.

What each one actually costs

Two footnotes that matter more than the headline numbers.

Google Sheets files count against your 15 GB now. Docs, Sheets and Slides created or edited after June 1, 2021 consume Drive quota; older untouched files don’t. Spreadsheets are small, so this is unlikely to bite a bookkeeping user — but the old “Google files are free storage” advice is out of date.

Excel’s free tier is the browser, and the browser is not the app. In Excel for the web, macros don’t run, ActiveX and form controls aren’t shown, protected worksheets open view-only, digitally signed workbooks won’t display, and some charts and external data connections won’t render. As of July 2026 Microsoft also ended the free desktop editing preview, so the free desktop apps open, view and print rather than edit. If you want the real Excel, you are paying.

Hard limits

The important difference is the shape of the cap. Excel’s limit is per worksheet; Google’s 10-million-cell ceiling is per spreadsheet, across every tab in it. A workbook with twelve monthly tabs shares one budget in Sheets and gets twelve separate allowances in Excel.

For bookkeeping this is theoretical. A business logging two hundred transactions a month across ten columns uses 24,000 cells a year. You are not going to run out.

On performance, an honest caveat: you will see confident numbers online for where Sheets “gets slow” — 50,000 rows, 100,000 rows. Google publishes no such figure. Those thresholds are practitioner consensus from blogs and forums, not documentation, and real behaviour depends far more on what your formulas do than on row count. Volatile functions, whole-column array formulas and heavy conditional formatting will make a 5,000-row sheet crawl while a 100,000-row sheet of static values stays fast.

Collaboration

This is Google’s structural win, and it is not close.

Sheets collaborates by default. Share a link, set an access level, done. There is no configuration in which it doesn’t work.

Excel does have genuine real-time co-authoring, but with conditions: the file has to live on OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint Online (SharePoint on-premises does not work), it must be .xlsx, .xlsm or .xlsb (Strict Open XML is not supported), everyone needs a Microsoft 365 subscription and to be signed in, and AutoSave has to be on. The failure mode is memorable: if one person opens the file in a version that can’t co-author, everyone else gets “file is locked” — and that person is usually your bookkeeper, on the desktop copy, at the exact moment you need to enter something.

If more than one person touches the books, that single behaviour is worth more than every feature difference below it.

Offline

Excel wins, but by less than reputation suggests.

Desktop Excel is a local application. It works on a plane, in a basement, on a train through a tunnel.

Google Sheets does have offline mode, but it is narrower than people expect: it requires the Google Docs Offline Chrome extension, works only in Chrome or Microsoft Edge, has to be switched on in Drive settings while you are online, and does not work in incognito or private windows. Set up in advance, it is fine. Discovered at the airport, it is not.

Formulas that only exist on one side

Google-only, and genuinely useful for books:

• QUERY — SQL-like filtering and aggregation over a range. The best single reason to prefer Sheets for reporting.
• IMPORTRANGE — pull a range live from another spreadsheet.
• GOOGLEFINANCE, SPARKLINE, ARRAYFORMULA, IMPORTHTML, IMPORTXML.

Two honest corrections to the usual version of that list. Excel has native sparklines as a ribbon feature, so the function is Sheets-only but the capability is not; and Excel’s dynamic arrays cover most of what ARRAYFORMULA exists to do, so treating it as an advantage is misleading. Excel also has STOCKHISTORY and Stocks data types on a subscription, which overlap GOOGLEFINANCE.

Excel-only:

• Power Query — repeatable import-and-clean pipelines. In Excel 2016+ on Windows, Microsoft 365 on Mac, and Excel for the web with refresh limits. If you import bank CSVs every month, this is the feature worth switching for.
• Power Pivot — data models across tables. Windows desktop only.
• VBA macros — which do not run in Sheets at all. Google ships a Macro Converter add-on that translates VBA into Apps Script, and Sheets’ own automation is Apps Script, a different language with a different model.

The round-trip trap

Here is the part that matters most if you buy or download templates, and the part that is almost never mentioned.

Google Sheets opens .xlsx files and exports back to .xlsx. It does not do so losslessly. Google documents these as unsupported when working with Office files:

• Macros — do not run; must be rebuilt in Apps Script.
• Linked spreadsheets — Excel’s links between workbooks.
• Protected cells — and this is the one. In Google’s own words, locked and hidden cells become viewable and editable.
• Embedded charts and videos — converted to images. SmartArt becomes a Google Drawing.

That third bullet is the trap. A great many spreadsheet templates advertise “locked formulas so nothing breaks” — a genuinely good design choice, and one that does not survive the trip into Google Sheets. Import an .xlsx into Sheets and the protection is simply gone; every formula cell is editable, and the guard you were relying on isn’t there.

Sheets has its own protection for sheets and ranges, but it is different in kind: you cannot lock formatting while still allowing value entry, you cannot password-protect anything, and Google explicitly warns that it should not be treated as a security measure. Whether Sheets writes protected ranges back into an exported .xlsx is not documented by either vendor — assume it does not until you have tested it with your own file.

Pivot tables and conditional formatting are also widely reported to break on the round trip. That one is community reporting rather than official documentation, so treat it as “verify with your file” rather than fact.

What this means practically: if a template is going to live in Google Sheets, it should be built so that it does not depend on protection to stay correct. Plain formulas, an obvious visual convention for which cells you type in, and no macros. A template that only behaves correctly in Excel is an Excel template, whatever the listing says.

Choosing

The decision is far less consequential than it feels. What actually determines whether your books are any use is not the application — it is whether the sheet gets updated, and whether it is tracking the right things in the first place. That question is answered in small business bookkeeping: what to track and what to ignore.