I Stopped Using Spreadsheets to Track My Portfolio — Here's What Changed

There's a certain pride that comes with a well-maintained spreadsheet. Colour-coded tabs, custom formulas, a pivot table that took three hours to build but now summarises your entire portfolio in one glance. If you invest and you've never built one of these, you might be in the minority.

I built mine in 2021. It pulled Degiro exports, calculated cost basis per position, tracked dividends, and even had a chart showing my portfolio against the S&P 500 — manually updated, every Sunday, with a coffee.

Then I stopped using it.

This is what changed when I switched to a dedicated portfolio tracker, and whether it was actually worth it.

The spreadsheet worked — until it didn't

For a while, the spreadsheet was genuinely good. I knew exactly what was in it. I'd built every formula, so I understood every number. There was no black box.

But the cracks appeared slowly:

Degiro changed their CSV format. Not drastically — a column renamed here, a new field there. But enough to break the import logic I'd spent a weekend perfecting. I fixed it once. Then it broke again six months later.

Dividend tracking became a mess. I held ETFs, which distribute differently than individual stocks. Some paid quarterly, some annually, some irregularly. Tracking expected vs received dividends required a second sheet, then a third. The Sunday ritual started taking two hours.

Currency conversions were always slightly wrong. I held positions in USD, EUR, and GBP. My spreadsheet used a static exchange rate I updated... sometimes. The numbers were directionally correct but never precise.

The performance chart lied. I was comparing portfolio value over time without accounting for deposits. A 20% "gain" one month was really just a large transfer in. Calculating time-weighted returns in a spreadsheet is possible — but it's genuinely difficult to do correctly, and I wasn't confident mine was right.

None of these problems were catastrophic. But together, they meant I trusted my spreadsheet less and less. I was spending time maintaining it rather than learning from it.

What I actually wanted

Before switching tools, I wrote down what I needed:

1. Accurate cost basis — per position, accounting for partial sells
2. Real dividend tracking — what I've received, what's upcoming, what my yield is
3. Honest performance — time-weighted returns, not just portfolio value over time
4. Multi-currency — positions in their native currency, totals in EUR
5. Minimal maintenance — ideally, I upload a file and it handles the rest

That last point mattered most. I wanted to spend time thinking about my investments, not about whether my VLOOKUP was correct.

What changed when I switched

I moved to Folia — a dedicated tracker built for Degiro portfolios. I uploaded my transaction export CSV on the first day. It took about four minutes.

Here's what shifted:

I stopped second-guessing the numbers

The cost basis calculation was automatic, handled correctly for every buy, sell, and dividend reinvestment. I didn't have to worry about whether I'd accounted for the 2022 partial sell correctly. It was just there, accurate.

The first time I looked at my actual time-weighted return — not the rough approximation my spreadsheet produced — I was surprised. I thought I'd outperformed the index. I hadn't. My spreadsheet had flattered me by not adjusting for deposit timing.

That was useful information. Uncomfortable, but useful.

Dividends became visible

I could see every dividend I'd received, broken down by stock and by month. I could see what was coming in the next 90 days, based on historical payout schedules. I finally understood my portfolio's yield — not as a number I calculated once and forgot about, but as a live figure.

I also discovered I was significantly underweight in dividend-paying positions relative to my stated strategy. My spreadsheet had never shown me this clearly because the data was spread across three tabs.

Allocation made concentration obvious

The allocation view — by sector, by country, by asset class — showed me things my charts had hidden. I had 34% of my portfolio in technology. I knew it was high, but seeing it as a donut chart next to other sectors made it visceral in a way a percentage in a cell never had.

I rebalanced within a month.

The Sunday ritual disappeared

This is the part I didn't expect to matter as much as it did.

I no longer spent Sunday mornings updating a spreadsheet. I still checked my portfolio on Sundays — but it took ten minutes instead of two hours. The data was current. There was nothing to maintain.

Those ninety minutes didn't disappear — they went back to reading, thinking about my actual investment thesis, and occasionally doing nothing at all. That was worth more than I'd anticipated.

What I lost

Honesty requires acknowledging the trade-offs.

I lost full control. With a spreadsheet, I could add any column, any calculation, any custom metric I wanted. A dedicated tool has a fixed feature set. There are things my spreadsheet did that Folia doesn't — yet.

I lost the learning. Building the spreadsheet taught me a lot about how portfolio accounting actually works. Using a tool that does it automatically is more efficient, but it's also more opaque. If you're early in your investing journey, there's an argument for building the spreadsheet first, just to understand the mechanics.

I lost the ritual. This sounds absurd, but the Sunday morning routine had value. It forced a weekly review. Now I can check my portfolio in ten minutes and move on — which is probably healthier, but it's also easier to be less thoughtful about it.

Is it worth switching?

If you're in the early stages — under 10 positions, investing for less than a year — a spreadsheet is fine. The overhead is low, and the learning is high.

If you're beyond that, the spreadsheet starts working against you. The time spent maintaining it is time not spent thinking. The inaccuracies compound. The missing features become meaningful gaps.

The switch was worth it for me. Not because the spreadsheet was broken, but because it had become the wrong tool for where I was.

The best portfolio tracker is the one that shows you the truth about your portfolio with as little friction as possible. For me, that stopped being a spreadsheet about two years later than it should have.

---

Folia is a portfolio tracker built for Degiro investors. Import your transaction history, see your real returns, and track your dividends — without maintaining a spreadsheet. Try it free at getfolia.app.