I'll take your FI tracking spreadsheet, and raise you a BI Platform

[NorCal]

I decided to teach myself how to use a Business Intelligence platform for professional development purposes.  I do financial data consulting, and this is something I could cross-sell to my current clients.  I chose to pick up PowerBI through some online courses.

Since there's no better way to learn than to create something useful, I decided to use PowerBI to track my personal finances.  First, I got all of my finances in a spreadsheet using https://www.tillerhq.com/.  It's an Excel add-in that connects to your bank similar to Mint.

Then I built some cool visualizations on top of it.  Currently, I'm tracking an FI date of around 2024, depending on how my assumptions hold up.  The FI calculations will update as the value of my investments change, or my savings vary from my saving rate assumptions.

There's a few tabs I didn't attach for privacy purposes, but here's what I'm tracking:

1. Income vs. Expense by Category
2. My monthly and quarterly savings rate, with some big red flags if I miss my 50%+ savings rate target
3. A detailed expense tracker where I can drill into the details of where my money is going by category and by merchant.
4. A quarterly tracking of my Net Worth by account type (banking, investment, retirement, etc.)
5. Graphs of my projected investment balances and planned mortgage paydown.
6. An assumptions check to see if I've historically been saving as much as I've been assuming.
7 (Pending) A breakout of how much of my change in net worth is due to savings vs. investment gains
8. (Pending) Actual returns on investments

[DadJokes]

I love looking at charts. Did you buy PowerBI or get it free through something? I took a quick look at Microsoft's website, and it certainly isn't cheap there.

On a side note, I was playing with my own dashboard during lunch, and one of the managers in the office came over and told me that she was mesmerized by the charts.

[NorCal]

The basic PowerBI program is free.  There's a web and desktop version.  You'll need the desktop version for all of your data manipulation.  But once the data is in, you can publish it online and view it anywhere.  They even have a mobile app, so I can view all of my dashboards from my phone in a (mostly) mobile optimized format.

The difference between the paid and unpaid version is the ability to publish things to other users.  It's a pretty cool program.

I did have to pay for Tiller, which runs ~$70/year.  That program has been worth it for getting my data into Excel.

Microsoft actually makes it impossible to give them money for the program unless you are a corporate Office 365 administrator.  It's pretty stupid. 

Dadjokes:  Are you mostly using Excel?

[DadJokes]

I may have to look into implementing that then. I don't have any need of Tiller, since I can just get all of the account balances from Personal Capital for free.

I am using Excel, and this is my current dashboard:

[NorCal]

I like it!  That Contributions vs. gains is exactly what I want to build next.  I also want to calculate % returns, which is surprisingly hard to get from most brokerages.

I have some other similar charts to that on different tabs.  I didn't share those, as there's more details than I'd like to put on the internet.