By Ethan Finkel
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Finance teams live in Excel. Much of the reporting, analysis, and valuation work performed by back-office teams happens in Excel and Google Sheets. Portfolio monitoring software can serve as the source of truth, but finance teams still need that data in spreadsheets for LP reporting, fund models, and underwriting analysis. Excel plug-ins bridge those workflows without requiring teams to export and rebuild their data manually.
Most leading portfolio monitoring companies offer an Excel plug-in. This review covers the main options and the tradeoffs that matter to finance teams.
There are a few common types of Excel plug-ins in portfolio monitoring, and they are not equally useful for finance teams.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Key Takeaway: Standard Metrics offers the leading Excel plug-ins out of portfolio monitoring products with a powerful, easy to use Excel Plug-in.
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.
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Key Takeaway: Chronograph has a solid Excel plug-in with strong capabilities, but the formulas are more platform-specific and not always intuitive.
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.
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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.
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.
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Key Takeaway: Vestberry has a functional Excel add-in, but it's quite rigid. Better for standardized reporting than flexible financial modeling work.
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.
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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.
Cobalt's Excel plug-in has the expected core features, but writing formulas can be cumbersome and highly specific to Cobalt's data model. The user experience also feels significantly 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.
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Key Takeaway: Cobalt supports cell-level formulas, but its syntax makes custom spreadsheet work harder than it needs to be.
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.
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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.
If you're doing serious financial modeling, you need an Excel plug-in that gets out of your way. Standard Metrics is the strongest option here: simple formulas, bidirectional sync, and an interaction model that feels natural in Excel. Chronograph and iLevel are solid alternatives, though both have steeper learning curves.
Vestberry and Totem are reasonable for pulling standard reports but are less capable when a team needs to build something highly customized. Cobalt has the right architecture, but its formula syntax adds unnecessary friction. Visible offers a Google Sheets integration rather than an Excel plug-in, which makes it a poor fit for finance teams whose reporting and modeling workflows depend on Excel.
