Certainly nothing wrong with using excel as you can tailor it to exactly what you want. When you’re starting out that’s fine and investing in time/money in a big fancy system probably isn’t worth it.
If it isn’t a long term solution don’t get too comfortable in excel, as it’s a right ballache to move all your accounts across. It’s better to do that before your business grows ideally! We did it the other way round.
We moved from having everything in excel to xero last year. After 5 years of trading it was a big job. I still use excel for more high level reporting that I couldn’t quite get xero to do how I wanted.
Really happy with it now, I do all the invoicing, bookkeeping, payroll and VAT myself and get an accountant to file our accounts at the end of the year. Soon I’ll have to do pensions too but it’s meant to be easy. Knowing that it’s all being done correctly, synced to the bank transactions, is a big weight off my mind and worth every penny.
Xero might not be able to do the stock take stuff but there are lots of 3rd party add-ons you can pay extra for.
And IME free software rarely works well enough to be with the hassle. The right tools for your business are worth paying for.