Investing

Spreadsheet vs app: how to track crypto and stocks across exchanges and brokers

Your crypto is on exchanges and wallets, your stocks are with a broker. A spreadsheet, each app's dashboard, or one tracker: the trade-offs of each.

LedgerVault team · 18 October 2026 · 5 min read

Most people who invest end up with money in three or four places: a stock broker, one or two crypto exchanges, maybe a hardware wallet. Each app shows its own slice, so nobody shows you the whole thing. Here are the options, from simplest to most automatic.

Option 1: A spreadsheet

List each holding, how many you own, and today's price. It's free and flexible, but:

You have to update prices by hand (or wrestle with price formulas).
Mixing currencies means looking up exchange rates too.
Working out real gains gets messy as soon as you add or withdraw money.

Option 2: Each app's own dashboard

Your broker and exchange each show a total. Easy, but you still have to add them up yourself, and each one may show a different currency.

Option 3: One tracker for everything

A portfolio tracker pulls all of it into one view. When choosing one, look for:

Read-only connections. It should be able to see balances, never move money. Read-only API keys and read-only bank links do this. How read-only keys work.
Crypto and stocks together. Many apps do one or the other.
Live prices and exchange rates. So the total is right in your currency.
Real gains. Money you add shouldn't count as profit.
Privacy. Your balances should be encrypted, with no ads and no data selling.

What "real gains" means

Say your portfolio went from €40,000 to €50,000 this year. Looks like €10,000 profit. But if you added €8,000 of your own money, you only earned €2,000. A good tracker separates the two, so you see how your investments are actually doing.

Tracking shows you what you own and how it's doing. It's not a recommendation to buy or sell anything.

Don't forget the cash

Your investments are only part of the picture. Stablecoins and bank balances belong in the same view, so you see how much you have invested versus how much you could use tomorrow. See are stablecoins cash?

How LedgerVault does it

LedgerVault lets you track crypto and stocks in one app: Bitcoin, stocks and ETFs side by side, converted at live rates. Track for free by typing holdings in or importing a CSV, or connect exchanges and brokers read-only with Premium. Then it all adds up into one net worth.