Nitish Parkar

There are many apps that can take your investment data and give you a fancy dashboard, plus some add-on services based on analysis of your data. If you don’t want all those bells and whistles, you can just track your investments in a Google sheet. You can even fetch the price of stocks/mutual fund units using the GOOGLEFINANCE function and add charts for a quick overview.

I have created an example sheet you can use to get the idea (or use it as a template). You can get the ticker name for GOOGLEFINANCE as described in this StackOverflow answer. One gotcha is, the price data returned by GOOGLEFINANCE can be a day old sometimes.

For me, there are two main reasons to get a consolidated view like this:

1. To know where my portfolio stands with respect to the goals.
2. If there is any deviation from the intended asset allocation.

Google sheet works just fine for both of these.

I have been using this approach for a few months now, and so far it is working well. I update the sheet once a month to record the SIP/STP transactions. If I make a lumpsum investment, I add it once I get the statement in email.

What do you think of this approach? Thoughts, suggestions - do let me know in the comments.