7 reasons why Sharesight is better than a spreadsheet

70% of investors come to Sharesight having previously tracked their portfolio manually in a spreadsheet. We can’t blame them – until we built Sharesight, we did the same thing. So why is Sharesight better for tracking your investment portfolio than manually entering all of your holdings, trades, and dividends in a spreadsheet?

Here are the top 7 reasons Sharesight is better than a spreadsheet:

Sharesight makes it easy to automatically import your holdings from over 170 brokers around the world. Then automatically tracks the performance of your portfolio with daily price & intraday currency fluctuations and incorporates corporate actions such as dividends and share splits into your portfolio as they occur. This not only saves you the time spent manually updating a spreadsheet, but also reduces the chance of human error. Sharesight even lets you track dividend reinvestment plans (DRPs) by automatically calculating the impact of those reinvested dividends — something that can get quite tedious if you’ve got a few DRPs going.

2. Understand your true performance

By taking into account the impact of things like dividends, currency fluctuations and the timing of inflows and outflows on your investment portfolio, Sharesight provides you with the complete picture of your portfolio and a true understanding of your investment performance.

Sharesight makes it easy to understand how both your individual holdings and overall portfolio are performing. This not only provides peace-of-mind, but it’s also the first step to making better investment decisions going forward.

3. Visualise your portfolio

Sharesight’s easy-to-read tables and charts allow you to easily visualise your portfolio. One such example is the Diversity Report, which lets you quickly assess how your holdings break down in terms of market, industry, country, etc. Furthermore, our Custom Groups feature makes it easy to organise your holdings according to your preferred asset allocation methodology.

4. Save time and money at tax time

With your investment portfolio data all in one place and powerful tax reports available in just a couple of clicks, Sharesight provides everything you need to calculate your tax obligations as an investor. This is especially useful if you work with an accountant as you’re able to share this data with them, rather than paying them to recreate your portfolio history. But why not take it a step further and share portfolio access directly with your accountant or financial advisor? You decide whether they have “read only” or full access, for one or multiple portfolios, and you can withdraw access at any time, making it a much more secure solution than emailing a sensitive spreadsheet back and forth. Not only does this give you much more control, it also puts you in a position to conduct forward-looking, tax planning discussions together – not just at tax-time, but throughout the year.

5. Get email alerts

Does your spreadsheet let you know if one of your holdings undergoes a major price change? Sharesight does, with optional email alerts that notify you if there’s a significant drop or spike in an investment’s price. And our popular weekly portfolio email provides a snapshot of how your investments have performed over the past week. Together, these email notifications ensure you always know how you’re tracking, even if you haven’t had the chance to login to your account lately.

6. Track your cash

Your portfolio isn’t the only thing you shouldn’t be tracking in a spreadsheet. If you’ve been tracking your cash balances in a spreadsheet rather than a dedicated application, you’ll appreciate the financial insights you’ll gain by connecting your portfolio to Xero or using Sharesight’s built-in Cash Account feature. By categorising your bank transactions, reconciling your trade & dividend data, and tracking your cash balances alongside your investments, you’ll have a complete financial picture of how you’re doing – from anywhere, anytime.

7. Check your portfolio on the go

Sharesight’s mobile app is a great way to check your portfolio and individual holding performance when you’re on the go. Available for both Android and Apple users, the Sharesight Reader mobile app acts as a companion to the main Sharesight website. Once you’ve set up your holdings and trade data from your desktop, you can use the free mobile app to track the overall performance of your portfolio(s), as well as specific holding information, including capital gains, dividends and currency gains. Try doing that with a spreadsheet!

There’s a better way

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Join over 100,000 investors tracking their performance with Sharesight

These are just 7 reasons why Sharesight is better than a spreadsheet. If you’re not already a Sharesight user, what are you waiting for? It’s free to sign up, and with Sharesight you’ll get access to:

Sign up for a FREE Sharesight account and get started tracking your investment performance (and tax) today.

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