Comparison
Vault compared with a spreadsheet
A spreadsheet does anything you can describe and nothing you forget to maintain. Vault keeps the parts that can be automatic — prices, exchange rates, totals, charts, history — and leaves you the part only you know. You can export the whole thing back to a spreadsheet at any time.
| Vault | A spreadsheet | |
|---|---|---|
| Any asset you can describe | Yes | Yes |
| Prices update themselves | Yes, for listed positions | No, or a fragile formula |
| Currency consolidation | Automatic, refreshed daily | Manual, and usually stale |
| Charts and history | Built from monthly closes | Hand-maintained |
| Works on a phone | Yes, in the browser | Technically |
| Mortgage amortisation | An engine with events | A formula you wrote once |
| Projection to independence | Monte Carlo, coast, drawdown | One row of arithmetic |
| Risk of a broken formula | None to maintain | Grows with every edit |
| Portability | Backup and CSV export | Total |
When the spreadsheet is the better choice
If you enjoy the modelling, and the thing you want most is a layout nobody else designed, keep the spreadsheet. Vault is the better answer when you would rather read the numbers than maintain them — and it exports to a spreadsheet anyway, so the choice is not permanent.