Spreadsheet vs Portfolio Tracker: When Excel Stops Being Enough

Ask a forum full of investors which portfolio tracker to use and the most upvoted answer, year after year, is not an app. It's “a spreadsheet.” On Bogleheads it's practically the house answer, and the German investing forums defend Excel with real arguments, not nostalgia.

They have a point, and this article isn't going to pretend otherwise — we make a portfolio tracker, so treat us as a biased witness who's trying to be fair.

What the spreadsheet genuinely wins

• Total control. Every formula is yours. No product decision, pricing change or shutdown can take your tracker away. That fear is rational: investing apps do die, and every user of a dead one had to migrate.
• Any asset, any logic. Your grandmother's apartment, a stake in a friend's company, an obscure bond — a sheet doesn't care that no API covers it.
• Free, forever, private. No subscription, no account linking, no one else's server.

For a portfolio in one currency and one account, with few trades and no dividends, a sheet may be all you ever need. Plenty of experienced investors never leave, and they're not wrong.

Where sheets crack

The cracks all come from the same root: a spreadsheet shows values, but a portfolio's truth lives in its history. Concretely:

1. Deposits masquerade as returns. “Value now minus value then” breaks the moment money moves in or out. You deposited €3,000 in March; your sheet says you had a great March. A real answer needs a time-weighted or money-weighted return, and building TWR into a sheet — handling every cash flow date correctly — is the kind of formula you get subtly wrong and then trust for years.
2. Dividends drip past silently. Each payout needs recording by hand, in the right currency, or your returns quietly understate reality — the more income your portfolio produces, the more wrong the number gets.
3. FX compounds the bookkeeping. A US ETF held from Europe moves for two reasons: the asset and the dollar. Separating them per position, per date, is real work.
4. Corporate actions. Splits, mergers and spin-offs silently corrupt hand-kept share counts. You find out months later, and then comes the archaeology.
5. The maintenance creep. The sheet that took an evening to build takes an hour a month to feed. Skip two months and updating becomes a chore you dread; the histories with a six-month hole in them never get fixed.

An honest switching test

Stay with your sheet if it's current, you trust its return figure, and updating it doesn't feel like homework. Consider switching when two or more of these are true:

• You deposit or withdraw regularly and can't say what your actual annual return is
• Dividends arrive in more than one currency
• You have more than one broker or exchange account
• Your sheet is more than a month out of date right now
• You've ever discovered a formula error that had been wrong for a while

If you switch, switch to your temperament

The good news: the trade-off isn't “spreadsheet or surveillance.” The tracker field has an option for every level of control:

• Closest to the spreadsheet ethos: Portfolio Performance — free, open source, desktop, every byte local, with rigorous return maths built in.
• Own your server: Ghostfolio — open source and self-hostable.
• Hosted, but no account linking: PortfolioGlance — ours. Built for exactly the spreadsheet refugee: you enter your current holdings (or import a broker CSV), and the history, return maths, dividends, FX and benchmarks are handled from there. Free at the core, with an AI health check the sheet could never give you.
• Full automation: getquin — links your accounts and syncs itself, if convenience outranks the privacy trade for you.

Still comparing? The investing apps directory puts 40+ trackers side by side, verified cell by cell — including the rows where the spreadsheet, honestly, still wins.