Started using YNAB 4 in 2015 before that was using excel too Excel is a good tool but for tedious tracking is difficult to achieve what I want and all my balances in YNAB is reconcile to my bank/cc balance.

YNAB has help a lot from the day I started using till now, if based back on my salary in 2015 my emergency/savings now is worth 4 years of salary before that I don't even have 5k savings.

If based on my income now, my emergency/savings is around 1.5 years only.

I don't track daily expenses anymore as most of the daily expenses is paid through ewallet. For big ticket items I will always paid by installments and this the reason I never separate my pots for different purpose.

I do used excel to track my investments and the new YNAB I personally feel is not that flexible compare to the one I'm using.