Do not go with cloud-based. They own your data and can blackmail or put you out of business at will.
QuickBooks (Online) is the most common choice. Not perfect and it has a learning curve, but it will be a big improvement over Excel for you.
There are some decent open source projects out there, the advantage being there are no licensing fees and you own it all.
https://softwareconnect.com/erp/open-source/
Quicken or QuickBooks. You can do a lot with Quicken. If you run a small business, you might want to go with QuickBooks.
Quicken is pretty easy. Takes some setting up of accounts, establishing downloads with banks and such and a little maintenance going forward. I have used Quicken since the 90s. It now has a yearly subscription fee. Once you get it working, it provides a good view of your financial status.
Quick books.
Do not go cloud based.
I use both quicken and excel. I use quicken to record and track expenses. I use excel to prepare an annual budget. In January, I use the data from quicken to update and revise my budget for the next year. The categories in excel are the same categories in quicken.
just keep the K.I.S.S. principle in mind
Excel is easy and you are used to it.....
QuickBooks Desktop version, NO CLOUD or Internet based of any kind. You are stuck with winblows though
Stick with excel. If you need to automate, post of upwork what you need, and you’ll pay 100 bucks to get it singing.
I used quick books when I ran my own business. But it seems you are looking for a household system. Quicken does that for me. It ties in with my IRA site and my E*TRADE accounts, and I can download all of my checking account and credit card information into a single source.
It is decent at helping us get a good expense picture going into retirement.
So, between the two, Quickbooks is more business targeted. Quicken is more consumer based.
Learn Excel better. It can do almost anything...all you need to do is unlock it. I have built a spreadsheet that tracks everything, does projections of income, calculates monthly budgets, saving etc. You’ll have to learn other software. I worked in the industry for years and never found anything that had more flexibility and privacy.
do you have the microsoft database system “Access” ?
It used to come together with excel and word in some Ms Office Packages.
I could build you a simple system in Access in a short time.
It could even take new data from an Excel spreadsheet if you did not want to do “data entry” with screen/forms.
Pro Bono.
MoneyManager Ex is a cross-platform software, similar to Quicken. Free for personal use.
Why change? Over a period of many years we have an Excel spreadsheet that does everything we need it to do. We keep it local, back it up nightly. It contains all the history for projects done on the house. No need to buy something, you have what you need already.