The four break points
| Break point | What goes wrong | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Manual entry | Typed figures drift from the statement; a mistyped fee or a missed partial close is never found | Every metric downstream is wrong by an unknown amount, and you cannot tell which ones |
| A second account | Two tabs, two currencies, two conventions, one ad-hoc conversion | Cross-account totals become meaningless; most people stop maintaining the second tab within a month |
| Grouped questions | “By strategy, by instrument, last quarter, excluding partials” becomes a pivot table you rebuild each time | You stop asking the questions, which is the entire value of journaling |
| A few hundred trades | Formulas that assumed one row per trade meet scale-outs, fees and restatements | The sheet becomes load-bearing and nobody dares refactor it |
What a spreadsheet still does better
Being honest about this makes the rest of the comparison worth reading.
- Arbitrary one-off analysis
- If you want a column that does something nobody else would ever want, a spreadsheet is unbeatable. Orderblock’s answer is the data explorer and full CSV export, not a formula bar.
- Zero cost and zero lock-in
- The file is yours forever. This is a real advantage, and the only honest counter is that a product should let you export complete history and delete your account at will — which is why Orderblock does both.
- Total layout control
- If you have built a sheet you genuinely enjoy opening, that habit is worth more than any feature list. Keep it and import your history alongside.
Moving across without losing anything
Import from the broker, not the spreadsheet
Export closed trades from your broker rather than uploading your sheet. The broker export is the reconciled source; your sheet is a derivative that may already contain errors.
Reconcile one month before doing the rest
Import a single month, compare it line by line against the native statement, then do the remaining history once you trust the mapping.
Bring notes across as journal entries
Attach your existing notes to the imported trades. This is the only manual step, and it is worth doing for the trades you still remember.
Keep the sheet read-only for a month
Run both in parallel for one review cycle. If the numbers agree, archive the sheet. If they do not, you have found something worth knowing either way.
Spreadsheet questions
Can I import my existing trading spreadsheet?
You can upload a delimited file and map its columns, but prefer a fresh broker export where one exists. A spreadsheet that has been maintained by hand often contains transcription errors that the guided mapper will faithfully import.
Can I still get my data out?
Yes. Complete trade history export is available on both plans, and the data explorer lets you inspect the underlying rows.
Is a paid journal worth it for a small account?
If you are trading a handful of times a month on one account, a spreadsheet is genuinely sufficient and we would rather tell you that. The switch pays for itself around the point where you have more than one account or more than a few dozen trades per month.