Why wealth data belongs in a sheet you own
Bank and investment apps are excellent at live balances. They are poor at being an archive you control. If the vendor shuts a feature, changes pricing, or you revoke access, your history may not come with you.
Google Sheets lives in your account. You can copy it, download it, share a view with a spouse, or open it on a phone. That is the point of a Spreadsheet Vault — not that spreadsheets are fashionable.
What to put on the tabs
At minimum: an assets tab (name, type, current value, invested value), a liabilities tab (loan or card, outstanding, rate if you care), and a history tab (date, assets, liabilities, net worth). Optional: expenses, goals, and upcoming money events.
Indian types should be first-class rows: PPF, EPF, NPS, mutual funds, gold, property, home loan, credit card. If your template still says Roth IRA, replace it.
Manual sheet vs CapitalMap on a sheet
You can maintain formulas yourself. Many people do, then stop after a few months because charts and validation take work. CapitalMap creates the Vault, lets you edit through a dashboard, and writes changes back to the spreadsheet.
It does not scrape unrelated Drive files, issue loans, or give advice. If you stop using CapitalMap, the Google Sheet remains in Drive with the last synced records.
Privacy compared with finance apps
Account Aggregator apps pull Indian bank and MF data with consent. Convenient, and the balances live in their stack. A wealth tracker on Google Sheets keeps figures in a document you can open in Sheets without the app.
CapitalMap still processes Vault contents while you use the product (it cannot display what it cannot read). The difference is the system of record: your spreadsheet, not a multi-tenant wealth database.
Start with a Vault, not a blank grid
Sign in with Google, create the Vault, and add a few assets and one loan. Net worth is then a live subtraction you can chart. Expand to goals and expenses when the balance sheet habit sticks.
Use the sheet as backup even if you like the dashboard. That dual view is the product: CapitalMap for day-to-day tracking, Google Sheets for ownership.