Guide
Travel budget spreadsheet or app? What each is good at
A spreadsheet is free and endlessly flexible; an app is in your hand at the till. What each does well for a budget across currencies, and how to use both.
Plenty of travellers keep their budget in Google Sheets or Excel, and for good reasons. Plenty of others start one, and by the second country the sheet has fallen behind.
This is an honest look at what a spreadsheet does well, where it gets hard once several currencies are involved, and how an app like Nomad Budget can sit next to it rather than replace it.
What a spreadsheet does well
- It is free, and it is yours: any column, any formula, any chart.
- Planning: before a trip, a sheet is the best place to lay out flights, rent and a rough daily budget.
- Sharing and reviewing on a large screen.
- It lasts. A file from ten years ago still opens.
Where it gets hard abroad
- Entering on the spot. A coffee costs five seconds to pay and a minute to log on a phone spreadsheet. Entries pile up for “later”, and later gets lost.
- The rate of the day. To convert each entry at the rate of the day it was paid, you need a rate per row. Google Sheets can fetch one with
GOOGLEFINANCE("CURRENCY:EURUSD", "price", A2), which returns a small table you then have to unpack — for every row, every currency. - Many currencies at once. Euro, lira, baht and dollars in one sheet means a currency column, a rate column and a converted column, and every summary has to use the converted one.
- Countries, not just currencies. France and Spain share the euro; a currency column alone can’t tell you what each country cost.
- No signal. Phone spreadsheets cope offline, but not always gracefully.
What an app takes off your hands
A travel budget app is built for the moment at the till: amount, category, done. Nomad Budget puts each country in its own wallet in its own currency, keeps the exchange rate of the day with every entry, and adds everything up in your main currency — no formulas. It works offline and syncs later, and it draws your route and each country’s cost on a globe.
Using both
- Plan in the spreadsheet, track in the app.
- Already have years of history in a sheet? Save it as CSV or Excel and import it into Nomad Budget: it works out the columns itself and shows you a summary before anything is saved.
- Want the numbers back in a sheet? With Pro, Nomad Budget exports every transaction as CSV, in the currency it was paid in.
Sources
Checked on 4 October 2026. Other apps and services are named here only to describe and compare them.