The Best Excel Plug-ins for Venture Capital Portfolio Monitoring (Analyst Review of Each)

Finance teams live in Excel. Much of the reporting, analysis, and valuations that back office teams do is in Excel and Google Sheets. Portfolio monitoring software serves as the source of truth for venture capital firms. When a finance team needs to satisfy LP reports, build a fund model, or model out an underwriting case for a company, the data in the portfolio monitoring software is what they need for this use case. Just having your data in the portfolio monitoring tool works for internal use cases, but when you want to use that data for analysis or reporting, Excel plug-ins are a life saver.

Most leading portfolio monitoring companies offer an Excel plug-in as a core offering of theirs. In this post, I'll overview each of the Excel plug-ins on the market and call out some main pros and cons.

How Excel Plug-ins Work in Portfolio Monitoring

There are a couple key types of Excel Plug-ins you'll see in portfolio monitoring, and I have some strong opinions on which are actually useful for finance teams.

1. Each cell pulls data These Excel plug-ins pull data one cell at a time using an easily composable formula. Each cell will fetch data from the portfolio monitoring software so that you can plug numbers in directly to your model.

2. Sheet level import These plug-ins pull all of the data as a table into the sheet. To be used in a model, vlookups are required to pull the data out of the synced table.

3. Complicated formula Some Excel Plug-ins have very verbose and complicated formulas that are specific to each piece of data you want to work with. These formulas are not easy to work with.

Best Excel Plug-ins ranked

Leading Excel Plug-ins

1. Standard Metrics

In my time at Standard Metrics, I was the product manager responsible for creating the Excel Plug-in, so I might be a bit biased here. But our customers loved it. Standard Metrics had many customers that had tried legacy tools and found the Excel Plug-in to be leaps and bounds better than alternatives.

The Standard Metrics Excel Plug-in supports both pulling of metrics from Standard Metrics into Excel and pushing of metrics from Excel to Standard Metrics.

Formulas are easy to write in the Standard Metrics plug-in with the formula =sm.get() working for all types of data available on the platform.

=sm.get("COMPANY_X", "REVENUE", "Q1 2025") will return quarterly revenue for company X into that cell. When building a model, this simplicity is a game changer.

Standard Metrics also recently launched the ability to write metrics via their Excel Plug-in. This is key for entering data that companies submit outside of the product or bulk uploading underwriting forecasts.

Pros:

• Excel plug-in has easy to use, cell based formulas
• Formula builder for creating formulas directly in Excel
• Standard Metrics offers a google sheets integration too
• Investment performance data and company metadata (name, description, FYE) are available in addition to metrics
• Pushing data into the platform is supported
• Pushing data has safeguards that prevent accidental overwriting of data
• Real-time data refreshing

Cons:

• Google sheets integration is in beta and has some rough edges

Key Takeaway: Standard Metrics offers the leading Excel plug-ins out of portfolio monitoring products with a powerful, easy to use Excel Plug-in.

2. Chronograph

Chronograph's Excel plug-in is a solid offering with bidirectional sync capabilities. Chronograph's add-in has access to all of the key data in Chronograph like fund cashflows and company metrics, but the interface for pulling data is a bit clunky. You need to find investment entities and their attributes and then query for them. This means knowing your way around the Chronograph data model and how to fetch their data.

Pros:

• Formula Builder makes constructing queries easier in Excel
• Access to cash flows, company data, fund data, and metrics
• Real-time data refreshing

Cons:

• Formulas are more specific to Chronograph's data structure
• Steeper learning curve compared to simpler alternatives
• No Google Sheet's integration

Key Takeaway: Chronograph has a solid Excel plug-in with strong capabilities, but the formulas are more platform-specific and not always intuitive.

3. iLevel

iLevel's Excel Add-In is one of the best features in iLevel. The plug-in provides direct data access to retrieve portfolio, fund, company, and metric data directly into Excel with refreshable workbooks.

Ask anyone who has used iLevel what their favorite feature is and it's the Excel plug-in for sure. However, like much of iLevel's software, the Excel plug-in feels a bit dated compared to newer alternatives like Standard Metrics and Chronograph. Be sure to be careful when pushing data because it's very easy to overwrite data without realizing it.

Pros:

• Cell-based formulas that pull data directly into models
• Ability to push data into the platform

Cons:

• Fat finger risk when pushing data - easy to accidentally overwrite with no easy undo
• Formulas can be complex and hard for users to create
• Primarily built for data upload use cases rather than analysis

Key Takeaway: iLevel has a powerful Excel plug-in that's central to their platform, but be careful with data overwrites when pushing information back to the system.

Middle of the pack plug-ins

4. Vestberry

Vestberry developed smart pre-defined functions to quickly load commonly used performance metrics directly from their platform. The add-in allows users to build custom formulas for performance metrics, KPI values, and ownership data.

The approach focuses on pre-designed Data Sheets for exporting large, well-structured data sets. The structure is more rigid than flexible cell-based alternatives but makes it easy to pull templates with minimal setup.

Pros:

• Pre-designed data sheets for common use cases
• Good documentation with videos and step-by-step guides

Cons:

• More rigid structure compared to cell-based approaches
• Pre-defined functions limit flexibility for custom analyses
• Better suited for standard reports than ad-hoc modeling
• Data sheets require vlookup work to integrate into custom models
• Not great for complex financial modeling

Key Takeaway: Vestberry has a functional Excel add-in, but it's quite rigid. Better for standardized reporting than flexible financial modeling work.

5. Totem

Totem provides a straightforward way to pull real-time data on investments directly into Excel. You select a company and field, and the add-in generates a custom function you can enter into Excel's formula bar.

The formulas aren't too complicated, but they aren't built like Excel formulas. They use dot notation which can make it hard to write formulas like an analyst is used to.

Pros:

• Simple formula
• Good access to data

Cons:

• Not well built for modeling

Key Takeaway: Totem has a solid add-in for basic portfolio monitoring, but it's also a bit rigid and unnatural for seasoned excel users.

6. Cobalt

Cobalt's Excel Plug-in has all the features you'd need, but the formula writing can be very clunky and specific to Cobalt's data models. The UX is also about 10 years dated.

As an example: It has formulas like =GETCOBALTCUSTOMFIELD(). User's shouldn't need to know what is or isn't a custom field. You should just be able to get your data.

Pros:

• Bidirectional sync capabilities (pull and push)
• Cell level formulas

Cons:

• Formulas are tightly coupled to Cobalt's data model and not super easy to reason about.
• Formulas are very difficult to reason about and use

Key Takeaway: Cobalt has an excel plug-in and it has cell-level formulas, but the syntax will make you want to pull your hair out.

Womp womp womp

7. Visible

Visible does not have an Excel plug-in. They offer only a Google Sheets Add-On that allows users to select portfolio company performance metrics or investment metrics to sync to Google Sheets workbooks, with data automatically updating nightly.

Users connect their Google Account, select spreadsheets to bring into Visible, and the platform searches for new data automatically. However, this is a one-way sync - you can pull data into Sheets but can't push data back to Visible.

Pros:

• Google Sheets integration for firms in the Google ecosystem

Cons:

• No Excel plug-in available - Google Sheets only
• One-way sync only (pulling data, not pushing back)
• Less sophisticated than dedicated Excel solutions
• Automatic updates are nightly rather than real-time
• Very limited compared to full-featured Excel add-ins

Key Takeaway: Visible does not have an Excel plug-in, only a basic Google Sheets integration that's pretty limited in functionality. If you live in Excel, this isn't a real solution.

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My Two Cents

If you're doing serious financial modeling, you need an Excel plug-in that gets out of your way. Standard Metrics is the clear winner here - simple formulas, bidirectional sync, and it actually works like you'd expect Excel to work. Chronograph and iLevel are solid alternatives if you're already locked into those platforms, though both have steeper learning curves.

The mid-tier options (Vestberry, Totem) are fine for pulling standard reports but fall apart when you need to build something custom. Cobalt has the right architecture but the formula syntax is so clunky you'll waste hours just trying to pull basic data. And Visible doesn't even have an Excel plug-in, which is honestly disqualifying for any serious finance team.