How to Track Your Portfolio in Google Sheets (Free)

You can track your portfolio in Google Sheets for free by copying a simple tracker, adding each stock's NSE ticker in a Symbols tab, and using GOOGLEFINANCE to pull prices automatically. The sheet can then combine multiple demat accounts, calculate P&L, and show holding days in one view.

Most investors don't have a stock-picking problem. They have a tracking problem.

Three demat accounts. A handful of forgotten passwords. An old SIP that nobody remembers starting. Six months later, the question "how is my portfolio actually doing?" takes a Sunday afternoon to answer — if it gets answered at all.

The portfolios that get managed are the portfolios you can actually see. Tracking is the cheapest, easiest edge in investing, and almost nobody bothers to set it up properly.

So in this article I'll show you how to build a free Google Sheets portfolio tracker for Indian stocks in under ten minutes. One file. Every demat account. Auto-updating prices via Google Finance.

Why Most Investors Lose Track of Their Own Portfolio

The problem usually isn't the stocks. It's the plumbing.

You opened a Zerodha account in 2018 because of the low brokerage. Then a Groww account in 2020 because the app was prettier, and your bank pushed an ICICI Direct account so you got that too. Three logins, three passwords, three different views of your money.

Most of the time when an investor tells me they're "underperforming the market," they're guessing. They haven't seen a consolidated number in months. The losers are vivid; the winners are forgotten. The portfolio in their head looks nothing like the one on paper.

Once everything's in one place, three things change. You stop holding losers out of denial because you can see them, you stop double-buying winners because you remember owning them, and you start sizing positions sensibly because you finally know what 5% of your portfolio actually looks like in rupees.

Make Your Copy of the Sheet

Download the template from the Useful Links→ page. Open it in Google Sheets, then click File → Make a copy to save it to your own Drive. From here on, your edits are private to your account.

Open the copy and you'll see two tabs at the bottom: Portfolio and Symbols. The Portfolio tab is where you'll log every buy you've ever made. The Symbols tab is the engine room. It's where Google Sheets quietly fetches the latest available price of every stock you hold.

You're going to spend most of your time on the Portfolio tab. The Symbols tab gets touched only when you add a new stock to your holdings.

Wire Up the Symbols Tab

The Symbols tab is what makes the whole thing work. It pulls the current price of every stock you own using one Google Sheets function called GOOGLEFINANCE. Free, native, and surprisingly reliable.

The Symbols tab has three columns: the stock name (in plain English), the Google ticker (with the NSE: prefix), and the latest price (auto-fetched). You only fill in the first two. The third populates itself once Google Sheets refreshes the formula.

Adding a new stock to your portfolio takes about thirty seconds. Three steps. Always the same order.

What the Sheet Calculates for You

The Portfolio tab does the math you'd otherwise do on a notepad. Five inputs in, four numbers out, for every row and for the portfolio overall.

The current value of each holding is just quantity × latest price, pulled from the Symbols tab. P&L in rupees is the difference from your buy price; P&L percentage is that difference as a fraction. Holding days uses TODAY() − BuyDate, so it ticks up by one every morning.

Profits show up in green, losses in red. The summary row at the top totals everything. That's the whole product.

Three Things You Can Add Once the Basics Work

Once the core sheet is humming, three small additions make it considerably more useful. None of them takes more than a few minutes.

Email alerts on a price drop. If your Google account supports Conditional notifications (currently a Workspace feature), set rules to ping your inbox when a tracked value crosses a threshold. On a personal Gmail account, you'll need a small Apps Script or a price-alert add-on instead.

Adjustments for splits and bonus shares. When a 1:1 bonus hits, double your quantity column and halve your buy price for that row. Cost basis stays correct, P&L stays accurate. Same logic for stock splits, just with the relevant ratio.

A "sector" column for concentration risk. Add one column tagging each stock with its sector (Banking, IT, Auto, Pharma) and a small pivot at the top showing how much of the portfolio sits in each. The first time most investors do this, they realise they're 60% banking-and-IT and didn't know it.

You Can Track. But Can You Pick?

A tracker tells you what your portfolio is doing. It doesn't tell you what your portfolio should be doing.

Once the spreadsheet is set up, the next question is the harder one: which stocks belong in there? Most retail investors get their picks from WhatsApp forwards, TV pundits, or the cousin who "knows somebody." A small number do their own research, and over a decade, that small number is the one that compounds wealth.

The honest truth is that picking stocks well is a multi-year skill, not a weekend project. But the moment you put even a basic filter between yourself and your buys, like "profitable for 5 straight years, debt-to-equity under 1, market cap over ₹5,000 cr", your portfolio starts to look very different from the average retail one.

Do You Actually Need This?

If you're not sure whether a tracker is worth setting up, run through these five quick checks. They map almost perfectly to the patterns I see in portfolios that quietly drift off course.

Quick FAQs