Brevizo and the End of the Net Worth Spreadsheet
Brevizo and the End of the Net Worth Spreadsheet
Millions of people track their finances in homemade spreadsheets. A purpose-built wealth dashboard is finally giving them a reason to stop.
Somewhere on your computer, or buried in your Google Drive, there is probably a spreadsheet you made to track your money. Maybe it has a few tabs. Maybe it has some formulas that worked when you built them and broke when you added a row six months later. Maybe you opened it twice in January, once in March, and have not touched it since.
You are not alone. According to a 2023 survey by Bankrate, nearly 40 percent of Americans who actively track their net worth do it in a spreadsheet. Not an app. Not a financial planner’s tool. A spreadsheet they built themselves, with columns they named and formulas they Googled.
The spreadsheet method persists because, for a long time, there was not a better option that stayed in its lane. Budgeting apps wanted to track your spending. Investment platforms wanted to manage your portfolio. Banks wanted you to look at your checking balance. Nobody was building a clean, single-purpose tool that just answered the question: what are all my assets, what are all my debts, and what is the difference?
That gap is closing. A new generation of net worth tracking tools has arrived, and they are built specifically for the people who have been doing this work by hand. Brevizo, a personal wealth dashboard launched out of New York, is one of the more focused examples. The app does one thing: you enter your assets and liabilities, and it calculates, visualizes, and tracks your net worth over time.
No bank account linking. No spending categories. No investment advice. Just the math you were already doing in Row 14 of your spreadsheet, presented in a way that actually makes you want to check it.
The spreadsheet loyalists have reasons for sticking with what they know. Customization is the big one. A homemade spreadsheet can track exactly what you want, organized exactly the way you think about it. You can add a column for your comic book collection or your side business inventory or the estimated value of the vintage motorcycle you are restoring. No app lets you do that out of the box.
But customization comes at a cost, and that cost is maintenance. Every spreadsheet is a small software project. Formulas break. Formatting drifts. The conditional formatting you set up to turn cells red when your credit card balance exceeds a threshold stops working after you insert a row in the wrong place. The chart you spent an hour building last January now includes three months of blank data because you forgot to update it.
“I have rebuilt my net worth spreadsheet four times in five years,” said James Okafor, a 38-year-old operations director in Atlanta. “Every time I told myself this was the final version. Every time something broke or I changed how I wanted to organize it and had to start over.”
The abandonment rate tells the story. Most personal finance spreadsheets are updated consistently for about two to three months before the cadence drops off, according to data from a 2024 study published in the Journal of Consumer Finance. By the six-month mark, fewer than one in five are still being maintained regularly.
Purpose-built apps solve the maintenance problem by removing the infrastructure work entirely. The Brevizo interface gives users predefined categories for the major asset and liability types: cash and savings, investment accounts, real estate, vehicles, and personal property on the asset side; mortgages, student loans, credit card balances, auto loans, and other debts on the liability side. Users enter the numbers. The app handles the calculations, the charts, and the trend tracking.
It is not infinitely customizable the way a spreadsheet is. You cannot add a row for your baseball card collection. But for the core question of personal net worth, it does the job without requiring you to also be your own spreadsheet developer.
The visual presentation is where the gap between spreadsheets and purpose-built tools is widest. Most homemade spreadsheets present net worth as a single number in a cell. Maybe there is a chart, but it is usually a basic bar graph or line chart with default formatting. It works, but it does not invite engagement.
Modern net worth dashboards present the same data with the kind of visual clarity that consumer software has trained people to expect. Trend lines show direction. Color-coded breakdowns show composition. Asset-to-liability ratios are immediately legible. The information is identical to what sits in the spreadsheet. The experience of looking at it is completely different.
“Design matters in financial tools more than most product categories,” said Rachel Dunn, a UX researcher who has studied consumer finance interfaces for a decade. “When something looks good and feels good to use, people come back to it. When it looks like a homework assignment, they avoid it. That is the spreadsheet problem in one sentence.”
The transition from spreadsheet to app is not happening overnight, and it does not need to. For the people who genuinely enjoy the process of building and maintaining their own tracking system, nothing will replace the spreadsheet. It is a hobby as much as a tool.
But for the much larger group, the ones who built a spreadsheet because it was the only option, used it inconsistently, and eventually abandoned it, the purpose-built alternative removes exactly the friction that made them stop. The numbers still come from you. The work of presenting them no longer has to.
