How to Track All Your Banks and Brokers in One Place (Without Spreadsheets)

If you're like most European investors, your money is scattered across:

• One or more bank accounts
• One or more brokers (DEGIRO, Trade Republic, IBKR, etc.)
• Maybe a savings platform or a pension account

Each app shows you a small piece of the puzzle. None of them shows you the whole picture.

The default solution? A spreadsheet.

In this article we'll cover:

• Why spreadsheets are a good start but a bad long-term solution
• What a proper "all accounts in one place" setup looks like
• How to centralise your banks and brokers without losing your mind
• Where Arfin fits into this

The spreadsheet phase: useful, but fragile

Most people start with:

• A Google Sheet or Excel file
• One tab per account
• Manual updates of balances and holdings

Spreadsheets are great because:

• They are flexible
• You can customise them however you like
• They're free and easy to share

But as your finances grow, you hit problems:

• Constant manual updates and copy-paste
• Formulas that break when you add a new row
• Difficulty mixing multiple currencies
• No automatic price updates for investments
• Hard to keep track of all accounts over years

Spreadsheets are fine for learning and experimenting. They're not ideal as your long-term financial cockpit.

What you really want: one live overview

In an ideal world, you would have:

• A single net worth number that updates automatically
• A breakdown by account (bank, broker, cash)
• A breakdown by asset class (stocks, ETFs, bonds, cash)
• A view of your performance over time
• Insights into your savings and investment rate

And ideally:

• Support for multiple currencies
• Clear separation between new contributions and investment performance

The building blocks of a modern wealth overview

To get all your accounts in one place without spreadsheets, you need three things:

1. Bank connections

Secure, read-only connection to:

• Current accounts
• Savings accounts
• Cash pots or sub-accounts

This lets you:

• See your cash position across banks
• Track income and expenses over time
• Monitor your savings rate

2. Broker connections or imports

For your investments, you need:

• CSV imports from your brokers (DEGIRO, Trade Republic, etc.)
• Or, where possible in the future, direct API connections

This enables:

• Consolidated view of all your holdings
• Correct valuation using up-to-date prices
• Proper performance metrics over time

3. A smart layer on top

You then need software that:

• Normalises data from different sources
• Handles currencies consistently
• Builds charts and metrics that actually help you decide

This is what a tool like Arfin is designed to do.

How Arfin helps you centralise everything

Arfin is being built as a whole-wealth tracker for European investors.

The idea is:

• Connect your banks (via providers like FinAPI)
• Import your brokers (via CSV and later, direct connections where possible)
• Combine everything into one live dashboard

You get:

• Your total net worth in one base currency
• A single view of all your holdings and accounts
• Performance analytics and allocation views
• A better foundation for long-term planning (including FIRE)

Instead of spending hours maintaining spreadsheets, you spend your time interpreting your data, not fixing it.

When to move beyond spreadsheets

You don't have to switch tools immediately. But it's worth asking:

• Do I have more than 2–3 accounts?
• Do I invest regularly (monthly contributions)?
• Am I tracking multiple currencies?
• Do I find myself dreading my next "spreadsheet update"?

If you answered "yes" to several of these, you've probably outgrown the spreadsheet phase.

Next steps

To centralise your banks and brokers:

1. List all your accounts (banks, brokers, pensions, etc.)
2. Decide on a base currency (usually EUR)
3. Export CSV data from your main brokers
4. Test a tool that can combine everything into a single view

If you want something designed from the ground up for European investors, with a focus on whole-wealth tracking and FIRE-style planning, you can join Arfin's waitlist.

That way you'll be among the first to:

• Connect your accounts
• Replace fragile spreadsheets
• See your entire financial life in one clear view