DoneThat vs Use Excel

The short answer

A spreadsheet is the most honest tool in this comparison. It has no marketing, no subscription, and no illusions about what it does: you type in what you did, and it adds it up.

The question is not whether Excel can track time. It obviously can. The question is whether you will keep typing, accurately, every day — because a spreadsheet's data quality is exactly equal to your discipline, and nothing about it degrades gracefully.

Where the spreadsheet genuinely wins

Say this first, because it is true more often than software vendors admit.

It is free and already installed. No subscription, no procurement, no security review. For a freelancer with three clients billed in half-day blocks, that is the entire requirement met at zero cost.

It is infinitely flexible. Any column you want, any rounding rule, any layout a particular client insists on. No tool in this comparison lets you restructure the data model in thirty seconds.

It captures nothing. No agent, no screen access, no cloud processing, no vendor holding anything. If you work under constraints that rule out monitoring software — and some people genuinely do — a spreadsheet is not a compromise, it is the correct answer.

It works on a locked-down machine. If you cannot install software, this comparison is already over.

Where it breaks

The spreadsheet has one failure mode, and it is not a small one: it only knows what you remember to tell it.

That plays out in three predictable ways.

Entries get made late. Nobody logs a task the moment it ends. They log it at lunch, or at 6pm, or on Friday for the whole week. Time reconstructed from memory is systematically wrong, and it is wrong in a particular direction — the fragmented, interrupted, context-switching parts of the day get compressed into tidy blocks that never happened.

Forgotten time is invisible. If you do not write down the forty minutes lost to an unplanned Slack thread, that time does not appear as a gap. It appears as nothing at all, and your spreadsheet quietly tells you the week was more focused than it was.

The overhead scales with the granularity. The more precisely you want to track, the more of your day you spend tracking. This is the trap: the tracking that would be most informative is exactly the tracking that is most expensive to maintain by hand.

And because it is your own record of your own work, nobody ever audits it. Errors persist indefinitely.

What automatic capture changes

DoneThat removes the entry step entirely. Capture runs in the background, the day is reconstructed, and you review and correct rather than compose from memory. The record covers the whole day, including the parts you would never have thought to write down — which is usually where the interesting answer is.

On the obvious objection, because a spreadsheet captures nothing and DoneThat captures a lot: screenshots are never stored. They are processed in real time and immediately deleted, and only the derived structured activity persists. Apps you exclude are redacted on your machine before anything is sent. With your own Gemini or OpenAI-compatible model, raw activity never reaches our servers. The desktop app is open source.

That is a real trade. A spreadsheet asks nothing of your privacy and everything of your discipline. DoneThat inverts it.

You can keep the spreadsheet

This is worth stating plainly because it is the most common good outcome: for a lot of people the spreadsheet is not the problem — the data entry is.

DoneThat exports CSV. If your invoicing, your client reporting, or your own long-running tally lives in a spreadsheet, keep it. Replace the manual capture that feeds it, not the spreadsheet itself.

Where the spreadsheet is the better choice

• Your work is already coarse and well-bounded. Half-day blocks against three clients do not need software.
• You cannot install anything, or policy rules out background capture.
• You reliably log your time and the numbers are right. If the process works, it works. Do not buy a solution to a problem you do not have.
• Cost is the binding constraint. Free is a real feature.
• You need an unusual format that no product will give you.

Where DoneThat is the better choice

• You keep forgetting to log. This is the common case, and it is a design problem, not a discipline problem.
• Your day is fragmented. Manual tracking is least accurate exactly where the interesting data is.
• You want to know where the time went, not just where you assigned it.
• You want coaching. Don nudges you onto goals, blocks calendar time, flags low-value work while you can still fix it, checks your mood, reminds you of meetings, suggests breaks. A spreadsheet has no opinion about your week.
• You want AI tools to have your work history. An MCP server and API make it queryable as long-term memory. A spreadsheet is a file.
• Your team wants shared signal without surveillance. Summary-level dashboards, relative trends rather than per-person hours, visibility chosen per summary by the person it belongs to.

How we compared these

There is no vendor to cite here — a spreadsheet is a spreadsheet, and the claims above are about manual data entry rather than about Microsoft. Feature claims about DoneThat are first-hand: we build it, and you should read this with that bias in mind.

The honest summary is that this comparison turns on one question with no universal answer: will you keep typing? If yes, the spreadsheet is free and fine. If no, no amount of it being free helps, because a tracking system nobody maintains produces no data at all.

Questions people ask about Use Excel

Is a spreadsheet good enough for time tracking?

For low-volume, well-bounded work, yes. If you bill a handful of clients in half-day blocks, a spreadsheet is accurate enough and costs nothing. It stops being good enough when the work fragments — many small tasks, frequent context switches, or anything you need to reconstruct more than a few hours later.

What is the real cost of tracking time in Excel?

The entry time and the accuracy loss. Every entry is a small interruption, and the entries you make at the end of the day are guesses. The spreadsheet itself is free; what it costs is either your attention during the work or the truth of the record afterwards.

Can I export DoneThat data to a spreadsheet?

Yes. DoneThat exports CSV, so if the spreadsheet is where your invoicing or reporting lives, you can keep it and stop doing the data entry that fills it. That is often the right migration: keep the spreadsheet as the output, replace the manual capture that feeds it.

Why would I pay for time tracking when Excel is free?

Only if manual entry is failing you. If you reliably log your time and the numbers are right, a spreadsheet is a perfectly good tool and you should keep it. The case for paying is that automatic capture produces a record you did not have to remember to create — which is a different product from a cheaper spreadsheet.