--- title: "Why Financial Advisors Still Rely on Spreadsheets in 2026" description: "Despite the rapid growth of WealthTech, many financial advisors still rely on spreadsheets to consolidate client portfolios across brokers, custodians,…" url: https://financialadvisors.com/blog/why-financial-advisors-still-rely-on-spreadsheets-in-2026/ --- [← Blog](https://financialadvisors.com/blog/) # Why Financial Advisors Still Rely on Spreadsheets in 2026 By Steffan Kharmaaiarvi · October 30, 2026 The wealth management industry has no shortage of sophisticated software. So why does a spreadsheet remain one of the most important tools in an adviser’s workflow? Imagine a financial adviser preparing for an annual review with a client. The client has a retirement account, an investment portfolio with a local platform, and a separate brokerage account containing US and Irish-domiciled ETFs. They have also spent several years living abroad. The adviser needs to answer what appear to be straightforward questions: How much is the client’s total portfolio worth? How has it actually performed? How much of the growth came from market returns rather than additional contributions? What is the client’s exposure to different currencies, markets and fund domiciles? Are there cross-border considerations that need further review? The answers may exist somewhere across three platforms, several PDF statements and a collection of transaction exports. But they rarely arrive in one consistent format. So the adviser opens a spreadsheet. Not necessarily because they prefer spreadsheets to dedicated software, but because the information required for the conversation is scattered across systems that were never designed to work together. This is one of the less visible problems in financial advice technology. The Industry Has Plenty of Software. It Still Has a Data Problem. Modern financial advice firms have access to an impressive range of tools. Portfolio management systems can calculate performance and generate reports. Financial planning platforms can model retirement outcomes. CRM systems can manage relationships and workflows. Custodial platforms provide account valuations and transaction histories. Yet these capabilities often work best when the assets are held within a supported platform or connected through an established data feed. That assumption does not always reflect the client’s financial life. Consider a client who holds investments through Interactive Brokers, a local retirement provider and a brokerage account they opened while living overseas. Even if the adviser has an excellent reporting system, not every account will necessarily connect to it. And importing the missing information is not always as simple as uploading a CSV. The challenge begins before the performance calculation. It begins with determining what the underlying data actually means. 1. A Transaction Is Not the Same Thing Across Every Broker Take something as basic as a dividend. One broker might report the gross dividend, withholding tax and net payment as three separate entries. Another might show only the net amount in the cash ledger, with tax details elsewhere in the statement. A third might combine the dividend and withholding information into a single record. All three statements could describe the same economic event. But if an adviser imports them without understanding their structures, the consolidated portfolio may produce inconsistent income figures. The same problem appears with: Corporate actions and stock splits Foreign exchange conversions Transfers between accounts Reinvested distributions Broker commissions Accrued interest Cash adjustments and reversals A particularly difficult example is a transfer of securities between brokers. If ten shares disappear from Broker A and appear at Broker B, that does not necessarily represent a sale followed by a purchase. Treating it as one could distort transaction history, realised gains and performance. The challenge is not merely extracting transactions. It is preserving their economic meaning. This distinction matters because a perfectly formatted report built on incorrectly interpreted transactions is still an incorrect report. 2. Portfolio Performance Is More Complicated Than a Percentage on a Dashboard Suppose a client starts the year with $100,000. Six months later, they contribute another $50,000. By year-end, the portfolio is worth $165,000. It is tempting to calculate: ($165,000 − $100,000 − $50,000) / $100,000 = 15% But that is not necessarily a meaningful measure of investment performance. The additional $50,000 was not invested for the entire year. To evaluate performance properly, the adviser needs to understand when external cash flows occurred and what the portfolio was worth around those dates. This is where measures such as time-weighted return (TWR) and money-weighted return (MWR) become important. TWR attempts to isolate the investment strategy’s performance from the timing and size of external contributions and withdrawals. MWR incorporates the timing of those cash flows, making it useful for understanding the investor’s personal experience. Neither metric is universally superior. Press enter or click to view image in full size They answer different questions. But both depend on reliable valuations and correctly classified cash flows. If an internal transfer is mistakenly treated as a contribution, or a withdrawal is omitted, the resulting performance figure may be misleading. A portfolio dashboard can calculate a return in milliseconds. Establishing whether the inputs are correct may take considerably longer. 3. Multiple Currencies Introduce Another Layer of Complexity Cross-border clients often hold investments denominated in several currencies. A client living in Australia might own: US equities quoted in USD Irish-domiciled ETFs traded in GBP Australian securities quoted in AUD Cash balances in multiple currencies What is the portfolio’s actual return? That depends partly on the currency in which the return is measured. An ETF could appreciate in USD while the Australian dollar strengthens, reducing the gain when measured in AUD. The security’s local-currency return and the client’s home-currency return can therefore tell different stories. This is not necessarily an error. It is a consequence of foreign exchange exposure. Problems arise when systems mix currencies without clearly identifying conversion rates, valuation dates and reporting conventions. A consolidated report should distinguish between the currency in which a security trades, the currency in which the underlying assets are exposed, and the currency used to present portfolio performance. Those are related concepts, but they are not interchangeable. For an internationally mobile client, the appropriate reporting currency may also change over time. 4. Cross-Border Portfolios Need More Than a Country-of-Listing Field Two ETFs tracking the same index may have very similar market exposure. But they can have different legal domiciles, distribution structures and withholding-tax characteristics. For example, an investor might hold a US-domiciled ETF tracking the S&P 500 alongside an Irish-domiciled UCITS ETF tracking the same index. From a market exposure perspective, these holdings may overlap substantially. From a cross-border review perspective, they can raise different questions. The relevant considerations may include: The fund’s legal domicile The investor’s tax residence Applicable tax treaties The location and nature of the underlying income Whether the fund distributes or accumulates income Local reporting and tax treatment An ETF trading on the London Stock Exchange is not necessarily UK-domiciled. Press enter or click to view image in full size Likewise, an ETF quoted in USD is not necessarily US-domiciled. These distinctions matter, particularly when an adviser works with clients who have lived in more than one country. Consider an investor who relocates from Australia to New Zealand. Write on Medium The holdings in their brokerage account might remain exactly the same. Yet their tax reporting obligations and the questions their adviser needs to investigate may change significantly. New Zealand’s foreign investment fund (FIF) rules are one example of why residence-specific analysis matters. This is not something that can be solved reliably by attaching a single tax rate to every security. It requires jurisdiction-specific information, assumptions and professional review. The goal of portfolio software should not be to pretend that these complexities disappear. It should be to make relevant exposures and assumptions easier to identify, examine and explain. 5. The Spreadsheet Is Often the Last Integration Layer When people discuss spreadsheet-heavy workflows, they sometimes frame the spreadsheet itself as the problem. I think that misses something important. Spreadsheets are flexible, transparent and familiar. They allow advisers to reconcile figures, investigate anomalies and construct views that their existing systems do not support. In many cases, they are doing exactly what the adviser needs. The underlying problem is that the spreadsheet has become responsible for too many jobs. It is simultaneously: A data-import mechanism A transaction-normalisation engine A reconciliation tool A performance calculator A client-reporting interface A repository of undocumented assumptions Those responsibilities should not all depend on manual intervention. Press enter or click to view image in full size Especially when the same work must be repeated across dozens of client portfolios. There is also a difference between using a spreadsheet to investigate an exception and relying on it as the permanent source of truth. The first can be an excellent professional workflow. The second becomes increasingly difficult to maintain as the practice grows. 6. Automation Is Not the Same Thing as Trust It would be easy to argue that artificial intelligence will solve this problem by extracting transactions from every PDF statement. And document extraction can certainly help. But extraction is only one step. Imagine a system correctly reads the following text from a broker statement: Transfer out: 100 units. The extraction may be technically perfect. Yet the system still needs to determine whether those units were transferred to another account, sold, redeemed, or removed because of a corporate action. That interpretation affects holdings, cash flows, performance and potentially tax-related records. A trustworthy workflow needs more than a confident-looking result. It needs validation. For example: Do reconstructed holdings match the statement’s closing positions? Do cash balances reconcile? Are transactions duplicated across imports? Are there missing valuation periods? Which records were inferred rather than explicitly reported? Can an adviser review and correct ambiguous entries? These questions are particularly important when automated extraction is involved. A system that confidently produces the wrong answer may be more dangerous than one that openly reports uncertainty. Good automation should reduce repetitive work without hiding the assumptions behind the output. 7. What Better Adviser Software Should Actually Do In my view, the next improvement in portfolio reporting is not necessarily another dashboard. It is a more dependable workflow between the raw brokerage statement and the final client conversation. That workflow should have several characteristics. Accept imperfect source data Not every client will use a broker with a supported API. Software should accommodate different statement formats and allow assisted extraction where necessary. Normalise transactions consistently Dividends, fees, transfers, foreign exchange events and corporate actions should be represented consistently without losing the original source information. Reconcile before reporting Imported positions, cash movements and valuations should be checked for discrepancies before performance figures are presented as reliable. Separate facts from estimates A confirmed transaction, an estimated tax exposure and a hypothetical scenario are different kinds of information. Press enter or click to view image in full size They should not look interchangeable in a report. Support the adviser’s judgement Cross-border analysis should help advisers identify questions requiring further investigation, rather than present complex tax conclusions as automatically settled. Preserve a reviewable history If a client or compliance reviewer asks where a number came from, the adviser should be able to trace it back to the underlying information and assumptions. None of these principles requires eliminating spreadsheets. But together they could reduce the amount of manual work required to produce a dependable consolidated view. 8. What Building Borderfolio Has Taught Me I’ve been exploring these challenges while building Borderfolio for Advisors, a platform focused on portfolio consolidation and cross-border investment analysis. The original idea was straightforward: help investors understand what they actually own, how their investments are performing and what changes when they invest across jurisdictions. As I started looking more closely at advisory workflows, the problem became broader. An adviser is not simply trying to display a portfolio. They need to understand the source data, investigate inconsistencies, interpret performance and communicate the findings to another person. That changes the product requirements considerably. Borderfolio currently focuses on workflows such as importing broker statements, consolidating holdings, reviewing performance, identifying indicative cross-border exposures and producing client-level reports. We’re also exploring country-specific workflows for Australia and New Zealand, including questions around offshore investments and investment structures. These capabilities are not a replacement for a firm’s existing financial planning system, nor are they a substitute for tax advice. They are an attempt to make the information between different investment accounts easier to work with. And there are still important questions to resolve. How much of the reconciliation process can be automated reliably? Where should an adviser be required to confirm an interpretation? Which cross-border findings are genuinely useful during a client review, rather than simply adding more information to an already complicated report? These are questions I would rather investigate with practising advisers than answer based on assumptions about how advice firms operate. The Real Opportunity Is Between the Systems Financial advice technology has made enormous progress. But a client’s financial life does not necessarily fit neatly inside the systems their adviser uses. People change countries. They open accounts with different providers. They accumulate retirement investments, taxable portfolios and holdings in multiple currencies. Their investments may become more complicated even when their financial goals remain relatively simple. The resulting fragmentation is not always visible to the client. It becomes visible when the adviser needs to explain the complete picture. That is where spreadsheets continue to play an important role. Not because the industry has failed to build sophisticated software. But because turning fragmented investment records into reliable, understandable information remains a difficult problem. Solving that problem will require better integrations, better data models and better reconciliation workflows. Most importantly, it will require software that recognises the difference between producing a number and producing a number an adviser can trust. I’m Steffan, founder of Borderfolio and Borderfolio for Advisors. I’m interested in how financial advisers currently consolidate portfolios across brokers, especially for internationally mobile clients. If you work in financial advice, I’d be interested to hear which parts of portfolio consolidation still require manual work in your practice. You can also explore our Australia and New Zealand workflow documentation. 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