A spreadsheet is the honest baseline for tracking your net worth: flexible, free, private, and yours forever. Plenty of people track their whole financial life in one, and for a while, it's the right tool. This is a fair look at where it stops being enough, written by people who'll happily admit a spreadsheet is fine until it isn't.
What a spreadsheet does well
Let's be honest about the free option first:
- Total flexibility. Any asset, any layout, any formula. Nothing is off-limits.
- Real privacy. It's a file on your machine. No third party sees it.
- Free, forever. No subscription, no lock-in, no account.
- You understand it. You built every row, so you trust every number.
If you hold a couple of accounts and check in once a quarter, a spreadsheet is genuinely fine. Don't let anyone sell you out of it.
Where it quietly breaks down
The trouble isn't day one, it's month six. A spreadsheet goes stale exactly when life gets busy:
- Prices are manual. Every stock, ETF and coin has to be updated by hand. The day you stop, your "net worth" is fiction.
- Crypto is painful. Balances move on their own across exchanges and wallets. Keeping a sheet current with on-chain activity is a second job.
- Currency drift. Multi-currency holdings need fresh FX rates to net out correctly, another manual lookup.
- No history you can trust. Unless you snapshot every month religiously, you can't see how your net worth actually changed over time.
- One typo, wrong total. A mis-keyed cell or a broken formula silently skews the one number you're trying to track.
- It's never on your phone in a useful way. Checking, let alone updating, a complex sheet on mobile is miserable.
None of these is fatal alone. Together, they mean the sheet drifts out of date, and a net-worth number you don't trust is worse than none.
At a glance
| Spreadsheet | Krosos | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | €6/mo · €60/yr |
| Privacy | Your file | Own database + keys per user |
| Live prices | Manual | Automatic |
| Crypto balances | Manual | 7 exchanges + on-chain, auto |
| EU bank & broker sync | None | Open banking + Trading 212 & Interactive Brokers |
| History & trends | DIY snapshots | Tracked automatically |
| Effort to stay current | High | Low |
When it's worth switching
Switch when the upkeep costs you more than €60 a year is worth, usually when:
- You hold crypto across more than one exchange or wallet, and reconciling it by hand has become a chore.
- You have five or more accounts, and updating prices is an afternoon you keep postponing.
- You want trustworthy history, to see net worth over time without manual monthly snapshots.
- You've caught the sheet out of date more than once and stopped trusting the total.
If none of that is you yet, stay on the spreadsheet with a clear conscience.
What you keep, what you gain
The fear in leaving a spreadsheet is losing the privacy and control. Krosos is built so you don't have to:
- Privacy by architecture. Every customer gets their own isolated database with its own encryption keys, not a row in a shared database, closer to "your file" than a typical cloud app. (And the desktop app literally is your file: it runs entirely on your machine.)
- Read-only, always. Connections can only read balances; the app can't move your money. (See is it safe to connect exchange API keys?)
- Export and leave. One-click export of everything, any time, back to a spreadsheet if you want. No lock-in.
- What it automates: live prices, crypto balances from exchanges and on-chain wallets, broker positions (Trading 212, Interactive Brokers), EU bank sync via open banking, and your whole net worth (stocks, cash, funds, property and crypto, minus the mortgage and loans against them) in one always-current number.
The honest bottom line
A spreadsheet is the right first tool, and a fine last one if you like the upkeep. Krosos is for the point where the manual work outweighs the €60: the private, EU-built way to keep the whole picture current without the afternoon of data entry, in your own database, with one-click export if you ever want to go back.
See how your data is protected, everything it connects to and how the tax engine works (including Belgium's new 10% capital gains tax, which a spreadsheet now has to handle too), compare all the EU trackers, or try the live demo.