Cancel Sharesight. Use This Excel Workbook Instead.

The renewal that made me cancel

I'd been a Sharesight subscriber for two years. Annual renewal hit my inbox: $228 charged for another year of "Investor" tier. I logged in to look at my portfolio before deciding. It was the third time I'd opened the app in six months.

The dashboard showed me what I already knew: my holdings, my total return, my asset allocation. None of which required a cloud service to compute. I cancelled the renewal and rebuilt my portfolio tracker in a single .xlsx file that afternoon. Six months later, I track it more often than I ever did in Sharesight — because the file is open on my desktop, not buried behind a login.

What Sharesight actually does (the parts worth replacing)

To replace something fairly, you have to name what it does well. Sharesight's actual value is five things:

1. Aggregates holdings across multiple brokerages — you can see Vanguard + Fidelity + Interactive Brokers + Coinbase in one view.
2. Tracks cost basis through buys, sells, splits, and dividends — running totals that update with every transaction.
3. Computes total return with dividends reinvested — not just price appreciation.
4. Shows asset allocation by class, region, and account type.
5. (Paid tiers only) Country-specific tax reports — AU CGT, UK Section 104, NZ FIF, etc.

The first four are trivially better in a spreadsheet. The fifth is the genuine tradeoff — we'll handle it honestly below.

The 1-cell formula that changes the game

Here is the single function that makes the case for cancelling Sharesight, in Google Sheets:

=GOOGLEFINANCE("VOO", "price")

That's it. Drop that into any cell. It returns the live price of Vanguard's S&P 500 ETF. Multiply by your share count, you have live market value. Refresh updates it.

You can do this for any ticker on a major exchange. For international listings, prefix with the exchange code:

=GOOGLEFINANCE("LON:VWRP", "price")   // London Stock Exchange
=GOOGLEFINANCE("TSE:9434", "price")   // Tokyo
=GOOGLEFINANCE("ASX:VAS", "price")    // Australian Securities Exchange
=GOOGLEFINANCE("CURRENCY:USDJPY")     // FX

It returns historical prices too, with a date range argument. You can build entire performance charts with it. Free. No login. No subscription.

If you're on Microsoft Excel and not Google Sheets, the equivalent is the STOCKHISTORY() function (Microsoft 365) or a manual quarterly price update — both work fine for a tracker you check monthly.

Sharesight is, fundamentally, this formula on a server with monthly billing.

The Excel workbook that replaces Sharesight

The gridmoo Investment Portfolio Tracker is the .xlsx version of what you'd build with the formula above, plus the reporting infrastructure to make it usable:

• Holdings — one row per position. Ticker, Name, Asset Class, Account, Shares, Avg Cost, Current Price, Market Value, Cost Basis, Gain/Loss $, Gain/Loss %, % of Portfolio. Current Price is where you drop GOOGLEFINANCE.
• Transactions — append-only ledger. Date, Type (Buy / Sell / Dividend / Reinvest), Ticker, Account, Shares, Price, Amount, Fees, Running Shares, Running Cost Basis.
• Portfolio Dashboard — Total Market Value, Total Cost Basis, Total Gain/Loss, Total Return %, asset class breakdown, top movers.
• Settings & Targets — your target asset allocation (e.g. 70% equities / 20% bonds / 10% alternatives) with drift alerts when you're off-target.
• Plus the standard print-ready report and a Start Here onboarding tab.

It ships with realistic sample data (12 holdings across Roth IRA, 401k, taxable brokerage, and crypto wallets) so you can see exactly how every column behaves before you replace it with your own positions.

See the Investment Portfolio Tracker — $11 individually.
→ See the workbook

How it works in 30 seconds the first time

1. Open the file in Google Sheets (or Excel — but Sheets gets you GOOGLEFINANCE for free).
2. Go to Holdings. Replace the sample rows with your positions: Ticker, Shares, Avg Cost.
3. In the Current Price column, type =GOOGLEFINANCE(A2, "price") (assuming Ticker is in column A, row 2). Drag down for every position.
4. Look at Portfolio Dashboard. Your Total Market Value, Cost Basis, Gain/Loss, and asset allocation populate live.
5. Each time you buy or sell, append a row to Transactions and update the corresponding Holdings row.

That's the full loop. No Plaid auth, no broker connection, no account aggregation flow that breaks every quarter.

What you actually lose by switching (the honest part)

Sharesight does some things this workbook does not. Naming them so you can decide:

• Country-specific tax reports. Sharesight generates AU CGT reports, UK Section 104 pooled-cost reports, NZ FIF FDR/CV calculations, etc. If your tax filing requires these and your accountant won't accept a spreadsheet, Sharesight is still the right tool. (For US investors, your broker's annual 1099 covers most of it anyway.)
• Auto-imported dividends from broker feeds. In the spreadsheet, you append a Dividend row to Transactions each time one hits. Most US equity dividends are quarterly — that's roughly 16 entries a year per dividend position. Five minutes a quarter.
• Automatic stock split adjustments. When a 4:1 split happens, you update your Shares × 4 and Avg Cost ÷ 4 manually. Stock splits happen maybe once a decade for any given position.
• Benchmark comparison out of the box. Sharesight shows your portfolio's return vs SPY (or your chosen benchmark) automatically. In the spreadsheet, drop one extra column with =GOOGLEFINANCE("SPY", "price") and compute the comparison yourself.

If country-specific tax reports are a dealbreaker for you, keep Sharesight. For most retail investors — especially in the US — the spreadsheet wins on every other axis.

The case for owning your portfolio data

Once you live with this for a quarter, the rest of the argument writes itself:

• The file is yours. Sharesight could pivot, get acquired, sunset the free tier, raise prices, or lose your data in a breach. Your spreadsheet sits on your machine and continues working regardless of what any company does.
• Every formula is readable. Want to know exactly how "Total Return %" is computed? Click the cell. There's the formula. No black box, no "trust us" disclaimer.
• Works for any asset class. Want to track BTC alongside VOO? Add a row. Want to include a P2P lending position, an angel investment, your house, your car? Add rows. Sharesight only tracks securities on listed exchanges. A spreadsheet tracks anything.
• Works for any currency. Add a currency column, use =GOOGLEFINANCE("CURRENCY:GBPUSD") for FX. Multi-currency portfolios are trivial.
• You can fork it. Want a "lots tracking" sub-table for tax-loss harvesting? Insert columns. Want a "what if I rebalanced now" scenario tab? Copy the dashboard, modify the inputs. It's a spreadsheet — change anything.
• You stop paying $228/yr forever. A decade of Sharesight is $2,280, assuming no price hikes (there will be price hikes).

What this workbook is not

Honesty earns trust. This workbook is not:

• A trading platform. You record positions; you don't execute trades.
• A tax-filing tool. It tells you cost basis and gain/loss; it doesn't generate jurisdiction-specific tax forms.
• Real-time during market hours unless you re-open the file (Google Sheets caches GOOGLEFINANCE results for ~20 minutes anyway).
• Auto-imported from brokers. You enter transactions manually or paste from a CSV export.
• Designed for day traders. This is for buy-and-hold investors who check their portfolio monthly or quarterly — the deliberate review use case, not the constant-monitoring one.

If you're a day trader, you need a trading platform with live data. This isn't that. If you're a long-term investor who wants to actually own your portfolio data, it's exactly that.

One workbook, then a whole operating system

Investment Portfolio Tracker is one of seven workbooks in the gridmoo personal finance catalog. The other six cover the rest of your money stack:

• Net Worth Tracker — monthly snapshot ledger across all assets and debts (replaces Empower / Monarch, ~$15–20/mo)
• Debt Payoff Planner — snowball vs avalanche strategy comparison with NPER-based payoff dates (replaces Undebt.it Pro / YNAB, ~$12/mo)
• Daily Budget Planner — 24-tab budgeting workbook (replaces YNAB, ~$15/mo) — this one is free
• Sinking Funds Planner — envelope budgeting for irregular expenses like Christmas, car repairs, property tax (replaces Goodbudget Plus, ~$8/mo)
• Savings Goal Tracker — multi-goal progress tracker (replaces Monarch's goals module, ~$15/mo)
• Subscription & Bill Tracker — annual cost surfacing + non-essential flagging (replaces Rocket Money Premium, ~$12/mo)

All seven workbooks together replace roughly $101/mo — that's $1,212/yr — of personal finance app subscriptions. Each workbook is $7–$19, paid once. Open the files forever.

The decision

Sharesight is a competent product. If you genuinely need their country-specific tax reports, or you actively appreciate the dashboard UI and don't mind paying $228/yr for it, that's a defensible call.

But if you opened a Sharesight renewal email and thought "I haven't used this productively in months" — try the spreadsheet for a quarter. The GOOGLEFINANCE formula alone gives you 80% of what you were paying for. The remaining 20% (auto-dividend imports, split adjustments, benchmark comparison) is five minutes of manual work per quarter.

You can get the Investment Portfolio Tracker for $11. Or browse the full catalog for other Excel workbooks that replace specific SaaS subscriptions. Either way, the file is yours forever, the formulas are readable, and no one can revoke access.

If you want to feel what these workbooks are like before you buy, download the free Daily Budget Planner — same architecture, same approach, no card required.

And if you want to see the exact dollar impact of every SaaS subscription you currently pay for, the SaaS Tax Calculator will compute it in 30 seconds.