Tracking one's expenses, savings, and income. On Paper, spreadsheet, app

Hi, I've been tracking my expenses using MS Excel sheet for the past 1~3 years. Usually, I try to record my expenses in Excel every weekend by holding onto the receipts and remembering the expenses that don't have receipts (cash-based, street donations, etc)

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I noticed that there are times when I have a hard time keeping track of certain cash-based expenses and when I categorise my expenses, I tend to have over a dozen different categories which I would like to reduce to just a couple to stay organised and neat. I also would like to track my insurance premium, student loan, bursaries etc in my expense log, so that I can analyse my monthly budget, etc.

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I used to track my expense on an app but found that after a while, I would stop or forget to track. Thus I'm planning to write my expenses, savings, income, etc on a notebook, or planner, so that I have a physical copy on hand to keep what I'm spending on, saving in, etc. Then I'll compile all of them in the Excel sheet to analyse and check if I'm staying within budget.

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For now, my Excel has the following columns:

1. Date
2. Purchase
3. Expense Type
4. Payment Method (Cash, Card (paynow, Paylah))
5. Bank Acc
6. Retailer Name
7. Cost
8. Comment (Reimbursement, discount, etc)

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Any advice to reduce my expense categories:

1. Transport (Private-Hired Rides, Taxi, Bus, Train, Top-Up)
2. Friends' gathering
3. Haircut, dentist
4. household
5. Gadgets
6. School
7. books
8. Apparel
9. Food
10. Charity
11. Medical (Doc's visit)
12. Miscellaneous
13. Souvenir (Concert, Merch, etc)
14. Asset
15. Event (Concert, Seedly Festival)
16. grooming
17. stationery
18. gifts

I would like to reduce to 5~6 main categories (for colour code purposes: Yellow, Red, Orange, Blue, and Green)

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Then I can use sub-categories so that I can be more specific on the items I bought.

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My goal is to create a solid foundation for my expense, saving, and income tracking so that when I have future expenses (Telecom, House, Bills, etc), I can integrate them with existing categories.

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How do you all track your expenses, savings, income stream, etc? How do you sustain your tracking habits (Notebook, Planner, Apps, etc)

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Do you think that compiling everything into a single Excel Sheet, or notebook is a good idea?

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Any suggestions and opinions would you recommend?

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Thank you for taking the time to read and help me with my dilemma. 🙇🏻‍♂️🙇🏻‍♂️🙇🏻‍♂️🙇🏻‍♂️