Record keeping - Savings and Investments, automation?

ChilliBob

Hey guys, 
Do any of you use anything beyond Excel and manual data entry to keep track of your savings and investments?
I was originally thinking towards savings, as I have a number of accounts open now fed by different current accounts etc. I was wondering if anyone has automated this in some way so they can collect the balances, for example, or transactions from various accounts into an auto updating spreadsheet. I'm obviously aware you can have auto calculations of formulas you have entered, I'm more talking about data collection. 

The same may apply to investments, but I would assume the various platforms provide at least rudimentary portfolio reporting and analytics. Hence my focus is around Bank Accounts. 

I come from a data background, mostly SQL but also some BI (mostly MS stack) and know of but haven't used Power Automate, but have used PBI etc

Obviously Excel is my starting point here, but wondering of the next step, in my former line of work I've seen spreadsheets turn pretty ugly pretty quickly and cause all kinds of issues!

Curious to know what other people do, for example those with say a handful of current accounts, more than a handful of savings accounts, investments across multiple platforms, even property etc

Cheers 

cloud_dog

Am old skool and still using MS Money with many accounts (current, savings, investments, pensions).  Yes I need to manually update some of the values, i.e. any dividends reinvested but mostly recurring transactions are automated.  Crafted numerous reports to provide either a summary or detailed analysis of the accounts.

ChilliBob

Thanks, I was hoping someone would chip in with Money, I'm perfectly down with oldskool if it works, I'd probably prefer it! I looked into Money though and it looked like you'd need to login and export from all your accounts and import into Money? 

DireEmblem

I use money dashboard as an aggregator for accounts that use open banking, and export to csv and open in Sheets.

For Trading212, I use: https://community.trading212.com/t/t212-contract-note-email-importer/15954

I also manually update Fidelity balances.

I've not found a great one source does all yet, but at least with using Google Sheets, I can customise my output.

I track earnings, outgoings, savings and returns with a very loose view on the FIRE principles to see when I can quit and support my lifestyle.

ChilliBob

So with Money there isn't a way to automate the data collection then? 

cloud_dog

With MS Money you can import transaction data, assuming the account provider offers an export feature.

With the way we function the manual overhead is minimal.  Most of our discretionary spending goes via credit card, which we pay off each month.  So, the current account just deals with regular transactions (bills) and a few adhoc transfers (additional saving etc).  With regard to balancing the account, I usually just access the account, check the balance against MS Money and mark the transactions as confirmed.

With regard to monitoring/managing regular and discretionary spending, the regular is managed by reports in MS Money and for discretionary I simply export the data from Amex who provide lots of details; who, when, where, category, etc.  So, I simply put it in a s/sheet and do whatever analysis I wish to.