Google Sheets is better for most freelancers and small businesses. It is free, works on any device without installation, integrates natively with Google Drive for receipt storage, and makes sharing with an accountant trivially easy — send a view-only link, no file attachment needed. Microsoft Excel (via Microsoft 365 Personal at $99.99/year) is more powerful for complex financial modeling — Power Query, Power Pivot, LAMBDA functions — but those capabilities are rarely needed for expense tracking.
For the formulas you actually use in expense tracking (SUMIF, VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, IF, COUNTIF), both tools are functionally identical. The practical advantages of Sheets are in collaboration (real-time multi-user editing built from day one), mobile use (edits sync instantly without OneDrive configuration), and Google Drive integration (scan a receipt with the Drive app, copy the link, paste into the Sheets row — your accountant sees it immediately from the shared sheet).
Excel's genuine advantages are offline access (the desktop app works without any setup, no Chrome extension required), and formula depth for users doing complex multi-table modeling. If you frequently work without internet or use Power Query to import and transform data from multiple bank CSV files, Excel is the stronger tool.
Both Sheets and Excel share the same ceiling: they become burdensome past roughly 100 receipts per month, when manual entry time exceeds the value of the tool. At that point, ExpenseBot auto-scans Gmail for receipts, categorizes each one to Schedule C, and writes rows to a Google Sheet automatically — keeping the spreadsheet workflow while eliminating manual entry. See https://www.expensebot.ai/blog/google-sheets-vs-excel-expense-tracking for the full cost and feature comparison.