In short. An Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheet works well while you have one broker, a dozen securities and are willing to type in trades and prices once a week. Once there are several brokers, crypto, monthly deposits and you want an honest return that accounts for those deposits, a service that pulls the data itself is more convenient. Below is a free investment tracking template and a comparison of the two approaches.
Download the investment tracking template (Excel, .xlsx) · Russian version
What investment tracking needs
- Trades — date, ticker, quantity, price and fee of every buy and sell.
- Cash movements — deposits and withdrawals, dividends, coupons, taxes and broker fees. Without deposits the return cannot be calculated: money you added is not profit.
- Positions — how much of each security, at what average price, what it is worth now and what it earns.
- Return that accounts for when the money went in — XIRR or TWR (the difference is explained in «Portfolio return with deposits»).
- Target weights — to see what to buy and what to sell when rebalancing.
What is in the template
| Sheet | What you enter | What is calculated |
|---|---|---|
| Cash | deposits, withdrawals, dividends, coupons, taxes, fees | the effect on account cash, flows for XIRR |
| Trades | buys and sells: date, ticker, quantity, price, fee | how much cash each trade took or brought |
| Positions | tickers, current price, target weight | quantity, average buy price, invested, value, P&L, weight and the amount to target: «buy +» or «sell −» |
| Summary | — | securities value, cash, portfolio total, net invested, profit and annual return XIRR |
The example inside: 13,000 deposited, 1,500 withdrawn, three securities and a dividend — a profit of 800 on 11,500 net invested, or 7.0%. XIRR is recalculated to today's date: as of 12 October 2026 the example shows 9.1% a year. Delete the rows marked «Example» and enter your own.
For the template to calculate correctly:
- rows on the «Cash» sheet go one after another in date order: the first row must be the earliest, as the XIRR function requires (it works in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice);
- all amounts are in one portfolio currency;
- the average price is over all buys of the ticker — after partial sells your broker may show it differently;
- current prices are typed in by hand — the spreadsheet does not update them.
Spreadsheet or service
| Spreadsheet | Tracking service | |
|---|---|---|
| Trades and deposits | you type them in, mistakes included | come from the broker or exchange |
| Prices | by hand or with formulas pulling from websites | update by themselves |
| Several brokers and currencies | a sheet per broker and currency conversion | one portfolio in a base currency |
| Return | XIRR with a formula; TWR is hard — it needs the value on the date of every deposit | TWR and XIRR, drawdown, volatility |
| Flexibility | any columns, any method | what the service supports |
| Cost | free, but the time is yours | a free plan or a subscription |
A spreadsheet wins on flexibility and full control; a service wins because data and prices arrive by themselves and the return is calculated correctly without manual work. Many people keep both: the service for the numbers, the spreadsheet for their own notes and plans.
How it works in Davinchu
- Brokers: Interactive Brokers via Flex reports (updated once a day), T-Bank with a read-only token (every 15 minutes). Securities, cash, average price, deposits and withdrawals arrive by themselves — more in «Tracking stocks from Interactive Brokers and T-Bank».
- Crypto: Bybit, Binance, OKX, BingX and HTX spot with a read-only key, plus manual entry and CSV upload for coins — «Crypto portfolio tracking».
- Return: TWR from hourly snapshots, XIRR (from 30 days of history), drawdown, volatility, Sharpe and Sortino; BTC, ETH or 60/40 as a benchmark.
- Targets and rebalancing: target weights and a rebalancing plan with a deviation threshold.
- Sharing: a portfolio link and an «Investor report» PDF.
The «Investments» section is on every plan; a broker account takes one of the account slots — Free has two. More on «Davinchu for stock investors».