Spreadsheet vs FinBoard: how much time you lose tracking your money by hand

1. Where the time actually goes

The hour you think you spend "doing the numbers" is rarely one block. It is ten minutes downloading statements, ten copying and pasting, fifteen fixing the paste that broke a formula, and another twenty wondering why this month does not match last month.

Multiply that by the number of banks, brokers and wallets you use. The more spread out your money is, the more the maintenance cost grows — and it grows faster than your patience.

• Downloading or exporting movements from each bank, one by one.
• Re-categorising the same recurring expenses every single month.
• Updating share, fund and crypto prices by hand to value your portfolio.
• Converting foreign-currency balances so the total makes sense in euros.

2. The errors a spreadsheet never warns you about

A wrong number in a spreadsheet looks exactly like a right one. A range that stopped at row 340 when you added row 341, an exchange rate from four months ago, a duplicated transfer between your own accounts: none of them show up in red.

That is the real risk, and it is not about being sloppy. It is that you end up making decisions — whether you can afford something, whether you are too exposed to one asset — on top of a total that nobody has checked in weeks.

3. What a spreadsheet still does better

Being honest about this matters: a spreadsheet is unbeatable for a one-off calculation. Simulating a mortgage overpayment, comparing two offers, sketching a scenario you will never look at again — open a sheet, do it, close it.

What it is bad at is being a system of record: something that has to be correct every day without you touching it. Those are two different jobs, and using one tool for both is what makes the spreadsheet die in March.

4. What changes when updating is not your job

FinBoard connects to your banks through Open Banking, to your broker and to your exchanges, and keeps the balances and movements up to date on its own. Your net worth is not something you rebuild every month; it is just there when you open the dashboard.

The interesting part is not the time saved, it is what you do with it. When the numbers are already correct, the question stops being "how much do I have?" and becomes "what do I do about it?" — which is the only question that ever changed anyone's finances.