Spreadsheet vs Net Worth App: When to Switch, and How to Bring Your Spreadsheet With You

The Short Answer

A spreadsheet is a perfectly good net worth tracker, as long as somebody updates it. That last part is where most of them quietly die.

When we went through a few hundred Reddit threads where people ask what others use to track their net worth (r/FIREUK, r/UKPersonalFinance, r/Bogleheads and friends), spreadsheets came up in more than half of them. Not bad for something that isn’t an app.

So, honestly:

Keep the spreadsheet if you update it every month without fail, your money sits in a handful of accounts in one currency, and you enjoy the tinkering.
Move to an app when the upkeep has outgrown your patience: gaps in the history, several currencies, pensions and funds you type in by hand anyway, or a sheet only one person in the house understands.
Or use both, each for what it’s good at (more on that below).

If you’re choosing a method from scratch, start with our overview of different ways to track net worth. This article is for people who already have a sheet.

What Spreadsheets Do Well

They’re free. Google Sheets costs nothing, and plenty of people already have Excel or Numbers.
Total control. Your categories, your layout, your definition of net worth. Want to count your pension at 75% to allow for tax? One formula.
Custom maths. Withdrawal-rate scenarios, tax wrapper allowances, a “what if I stop at 52” tab. No app will model your life exactly the way you would.
Prices for a lot of stocks. In Google Sheets, =GOOGLEFINANCE("NASDAQ:GOOG") pulls a price, and the same function fetches exchange rates and historical prices. Excel has a Stocks data type and a STOCKHISTORY function that do something similar.
The file lives where you put it. No company’s servers, no company’s business model. (Unless it’s in Google Drive, in which case it’s Google’s servers, but you knew that.)

That last one is a real advantage: a net worth app, TrackMyStack included, keeps your data on its servers so it can reach your phone.

Where Spreadsheets Start to Creak

None of this is impossible in a spreadsheet. Each item is just another job you’ve given yourself.

History only exists if you save it

A sheet with live prices shows today. To see last year, you need snapshots: copy the totals, paste as values into a history tab, every month. Miss a few months and your chart has a hole no formula can fill, because the sheet never recorded what you held back then.

You can look up past prices with GOOGLEFINANCE or STOCKHISTORY, but only if you know what you owned on each date. And Google says GOOGLEFINANCE’s historical data can’t be read through Apps Script, so automating snapshots is fiddlier than it sounds.

Every currency is another column

One currency is easy. Add a US brokerage account, some euros and a bit of crypto, and every holding needs a rate and every snapshot needs that day’s rate. GOOGLEFINANCE and Excel’s Currencies data type will fetch rates; keeping years of snapshots consistent is still on you.

Dividends are a separate project

GOOGLEFINANCE offers price, P/E, market cap and a dozen other attributes, but no dividends. Most dividend tabs are typed in by hand from broker statements, which is fine until you hold thirty things that pay quarterly.

Funds, pensions and anything without a ticker

Google’s help page says GOOGLEFINANCE doesn’t support most international exchanges, that mutual fund data isn’t supported in Sheets, and that quotes can be up to 20 minutes late. Crypto isn’t in the documentation at all: a few big coins have worked as currency pairs like CURRENCY:BTCUSD, and smaller ones usually mean bolting on a third-party price API.

Excel’s Stocks data type accepts fund names, but it needs a Microsoft 365 subscription (or Excel for the web with a free Microsoft account), and Microsoft describes the data as delayed. Open that workbook in an older Excel and the linked cells show #VALUE!.

Then there are workplace pension funds with no public ticker at all (more in our piece on workplace pensions for early retirement). For those, the “formula” is you, logging in to the provider’s website and copying a number across.

Phones

Checking your net worth on a phone means opening a twelve-tab spreadsheet, pinch-zooming to the summary and hoping you didn’t just type into it.

Formulas break quietly

A SUM range that stops one row short of the account you added in March. A number pasted over a formula. An #N/A because a price source had a bad day. A spreadsheet won’t tell you, so a wrong total can sit there for months looking perfectly confident.

Someone has to maintain it for years

A net worth record earns its keep over years, so the sheet has to survive job changes, house moves and the occasional chaotic spring. And if only you understand it, your household’s finances live in your head and one file.

Should You Switch? A Checklist

Count how many apply:

You’ve missed snapshots and the history has gaps you can’t fill.
You hold more than one currency, and FX has its own tab.
You type in fund or pension values by hand because no formula covers them.
You track dividends manually from statements.
You want to check your number on your phone without opening a spreadsheet app.
You’ve found a formula error that had been wrong for a while.
A partner would need to understand it if you weren’t around.

Three or more, and an app will probably give you back real time each month. One or two, and a spreadsheet tune-up (a history tab, a currency table, a locked summary sheet) may be enough. And if your sheet’s real value is custom modelling, keep it: no app will match your bespoke tax-and-drawdown tab.

The Middle Path: Keep the Sheet, Hand Over the Record

You don’t have to choose. A setup that works well for many people:

The app keeps the record: holdings, prices, dated values and net worth history, on your phone.
The spreadsheet does the thinking: budget, plans, scenarios, the tabs that are genuinely yours.

To connect the two, pick an app that lets you pull your numbers out. TrackMyStack has a REST API with personal access tokens, and our ChatGPT, Claude and REST API article includes a short Google Apps Script that writes your net worth into a Google Sheet every day. Your history tab fills itself.

Whichever app you pick, check how to get your data back out before you commit. Spreadsheet people are wary of lock-in, and rightly so.

How to Move a Spreadsheet Into TrackMyStack

TrackMyStack is a net worth and portfolio tracker that never links to your bank or broker: you add what you own, it prices what has a market price, and you record values for everything else. Here’s how to bring a sheet across.

1. Work out what kind of sheet you have

The import reads two kinds of data: current holdings (ticker or ISIN, quantity, perhaps an average cost) and transaction history (dated buys and sells). A transaction log is the better source, because the import uses supported dated trades to rebuild your history instead of starting it today. Dividends, cash transfers, corporate actions and some broker-specific events may come back as unsupported rather than imported, so check the preview against your sheet.

If your sheet is a month-by-month log of account balances, be realistic: the import is built around holdings and trades, not balance logs. Bring across today’s holdings, add older values by hand where the history matters, and keep the old sheet as an archive.

2. Tidy one tab

Each import goes into one portfolio, new or existing, so take one account at a time. Where you have them, give each line a ticker or ISIN, quantity, currency and average cost or unit price, under clear column headings. For Excel files the import reads the first sheet, so move the tab you want to the front. In Google Sheets, File → Download → Comma-separated values saves just the current tab as a CSV.

If your sheet covers a dozen accounts, connecting ChatGPT or Claude and asking it to record the holdings is another route.

3. Import from file

In the app, choose Import from file and upload a CSV, an Excel file, a PDF statement or screenshots. You get a review before anything is added: matched assets, quantities, and any rows it couldn’t use, with the reason. Lines it can’t match to a market-priced asset can be kept as manual assets, so nothing quietly disappears. The import page has sample files and the current format details.

Two honest caveats. The import is in beta, so read the review properly. And the file is read by an AI provider: TrackMyStack attaches no account details, but the provider can read anything printed in the file, and the file is deleted after reading. If your sheet has names or account numbers in it, delete those columns first. If you’d rather no AI provider sees it at all, add holdings by hand instead.

4. Add everything without a ticker

Cash, property, pensions, cars and loans go in as manual holdings. Every value is dated, so you can add older values with their dates and rebuild some history. A house can be an “Asset with Liability”: enter its value and the mortgage, and the app shows the net figure. The Update manual holdings page lets you refresh them all at once, with an optional monthly reminder on a day you choose.

5. Let it do the boring parts

Each portfolio can have its own currency, and net worth is shown in your home currency. A portfolio for a jointly owned flat can be set to 50% ownership. Dividends received, allocation by asset and currency, and a net worth chart from one week to your full history need no building, and a home-screen widget shows the number without opening the app. Free accounts get end-of-day prices, slower than GOOGLEFINANCE but fine for a net worth record; Premium adds live prices where available.

Your data syncs securely to TrackMyStack’s servers, which is how it appears on your phone and in the web app. If you ever want to go back to a spreadsheet, Account → Your data → Export gives you an Excel file.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is a spreadsheet good enough to track net worth? Yes, if you update it regularly and your finances are fairly simple. Trouble usually starts with missed snapshots, several currencies and assets no price formula covers.

Does GOOGLEFINANCE work for funds and pensions? Often not. Google says mutual fund data isn’t supported in Sheets and most international exchanges aren’t covered, and many workplace pension funds have no ticker at all.

Can I import a Google Sheet into TrackMyStack? Yes. Download the tab as a CSV or Excel file, use Import from file in the app, and review the result before anything is added.

Will I lose my history if I switch from a spreadsheet? If your sheet has a transaction log, supported dated trades rebuild your holdings history, though dividends, transfers and corporate actions may be reported as unsupported. Manual holdings can be given past values with their dates, and your old sheet can stay as an archive.

Can I keep using my spreadsheet alongside an app? Yes. With TrackMyStack you can pull your net worth into a sheet through the REST API, or export to Excel from Account → Your data.

Do I need to link my bank to use TrackMyStack? No. TrackMyStack never asks for a bank or broker login. You add holdings yourself, import a file, or use an AI assistant.

The Bottom Line

A spreadsheet is a fine net worth tracker for as long as you’re happy to be its price feed, FX desk and history archivist. When those jobs take longer than the looking, move the record to an app and keep the sheet for what spreadsheets do best: thinking. If you’d like to try TrackMyStack, the web app starts without a name or email, and your spreadsheet can come with you.