I had been looking for a Google Finance Portfolio replacement for a while. You may all know that I am a big fan of Wealthica, which I relate to as the Canadian version of Personal Capital. I am still not able to add my bank accounts but I am able to keep track of my investment accounts which is very important to me. I love Wealthica as my portfolio tracker (especially since it is free).

Recently Wealthica added on some add-ons. All of the add-ons are free with the exception of one. The add-ons include a balance sheet, income (my favourite function of Wealthica by far, I can track my dividend income YTD or per month and it is converted from USD to Canadian dollars for me already), realized gains, and performance.

This is what my favourite part of Wealthica looks like (the income add-on). For an Excel illiterate person like me (I just recently learned how to “SUM” without having to look it up how to do it again, that’s how bad it is), this is very helpful so I can quickly see exactly what my year to date dividend income is (almost $5800 for the year, yay!), or what my average monthly dividend income is, or how much in dividends I received last month or for this month so far.

Wealthica also automatically converts my USD dividends to Canadian dollars so I know exactly how much I collected (and I don’t have to look up the estimated currency conversion rate).

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The performance add-on by Wealthica is interesting as you can track year to date performance of the S&P500 and the S&P/TSX Composite on a graph…. and then you can compare that to your own performance which is shown under the graph.

Finally, the Wealthica add-on that has a fee is called the Google Sheets Export. It’s like a Google Finance Portfolio replacement. It is the only add-on that has a fee to it. It is $5.99 per month for a subscription. Initially, I misread it and thought it was a one-time payment of $5.99, but that’s not the case. Nonetheless, I decided to fork out the $5.99 to see if it is worth the money and whether this would be a good Google Portfolio replacement since it exports all the information in Wealthica automatically into Google Sheets. With a click of a button. Yes, it’s that simple.

Google Sheets Export Add-On with Wealthica

When you click on Google Sheets Export, you have to have a Google/ Gmail account in order to use this add-on. They tell you that you will be charged $5.99 per month until you cancel it.

It really only took a few clicks here and there and this amazing spreadsheet formed before my eyes (within seconds). It was pretty cool- because a spreadsheet like that would have taken me hours to make.

In order to get the Google Sheets document, you have to authorize Wealthica to access your Google Drive and then they will put a spreadsheet in there. Then you click “Create Spreadsheet”.

The two Google spreadsheets available that Wealthica can make for you are:

A spreadsheet of all your investment positions: including ticker symbol, asset class, institution, account, number of shares, currency, book value, and market value.

including ticker symbol, asset class, institution, account, number of shares, currency, book value, and market value. A spreadsheet of all your transactions: Including settlement date, type of transaction (like whether it was a purchase, a dividend distribution, or a sale), the currency, and the amount

After you click connect your Google and Wealthica accounts, Wealthica automatically creates a folder in your Google Drive called Wealthica Exports. This is what it looks like:

Then you can create your two spreadsheets and name them however you wish. I gave some very uncreative names for mine.

Finally, you can click through to the spreadsheets in your Google Drive and then you get the spreadsheet.

Here is what the investment positions spreadsheet looks like:

One downside is that some of the symbols are Google ‘Spreadsheetified’ (for lack of a better word…meaning that it is highlighted and clickable) and most of them are not. In my own Google Spreadsheet that I do manually, most of my symbols are highlighted and therefore you can see the market value more accurately reflect the amount.

However, this is a ‘snapshot’ of the day that you create the spreadsheet from Wealthica, so it makes sense that the symbols are not clickable.

Here is what the transactions Google spreadsheet look like:

Personally, I would like it even more if the titles were highlighted with the background in a nice colour, but the bolded font is still pretty good! The columns are organized and labelled well.

Is the Google Spreadsheet Export Add-On Worth It?

Personally, I think the $5.99 Google Spreadsheet Export add-on is totally worth it since it’s so similar to a Google Finance Portfolio replacement, but I wouldn’t pay for it on a monthly basis. The most useful would be year end (e.g. December 31) when I’m trying to collect transactions and purchases on an annual basis to keep track of buys and sells and distributions for tax time.

I currently document my purchases outside of my RRSP and TFSA in an old school notebook and with my dollar cost averaging it can get pretty frequent! So difficult to keep track of everything. Sometimes I also put in limit orders and the settlement date that I write in my old school notebook may not be reflective of the actual settlement date, so this is definitely worth the $5.99 and change to keep things accurate for tax time.

If they had a column for the dividend yield (or forward dividend yield) that would be even better!

However, you can add the dividends into your Google Spreadsheet by way of Google Finance formulas to add the data, or you can add this formula into your Google Spreadsheet:

=SUMIFS(Transactions!I3:I11, Transactions!G3:G11,”*”&C4&”*” ,Transactions!C3:C11,” DIVIDEND”)

There is more information on how to add total dividends collected in a Reddit post.

I guess if I were into spreadsheets and exporting my data into spreadsheets more regularly (I know a lot of people are fantastic and adept with spreadsheets) then the $5.99 may be worth it per month, but I don’t use this so much, so a ‘snapshot’ picture for me is fine.

Disconnecting Google Drive from Wealthica

I chose to disconnect Google Drive from Wealthica to cancel the monthly subscription. You get an invoice in the billing section that you can print out and use for tax purposes.

The google spreadsheet that was created is still there when you disconnect Google Drive from Wealthica. Then in ‘preferences’ (it is above the log out button), you click on your billing information and then you disconnect or remove your credit card.

After this is removed, you will not be billed on a monthly basis for the Google Spreadsheet Export Add-on but you also have to uninstall.

To uninstall the Google Sheets Add-On in Wealthica, you can click here and log in to your Wealthica account.

Anyway, in summary, I think the $5.99 Google Spreadsheet Add-On is worth it (if you are doing a snapshot of your portfolio) and is a good solution for a replacement of the Google Finance Portfolio, in a sense. I would not subscribe to it monthly though- but that’s because I am very averse to subscribing to things on a monthly basis!

This saves me a TON of time preparing my taxes when it comes to tax time and I don’t have to be embarrassed trying to review my old chicken scratch in my buy/sell notebook.

For my take on Wealthica, The Canadian version of Personal Capital, please read my review here.

To sign up for Wealthica to track your investment portfolio for free (just like Personal Capital for Canadians), click here.

Do you use Wealthica’s Google Spreadsheet export add-on? What are your thoughts?

What do you usually use to keep track of your investment portfolio?