At the end of every financial year, I like to consolidate my mutual fund holdings. Like most personal finance enthusiasts, I started with Google Finance to track my portfolio. It worked well initially, but over time, I outgrew it. It lacked critical financial calculations like XIRR, which I needed for measuring returns on irregular investments like SIPs and lumpsum investments. I tried Google Sheets, but the experience of building charts and dashboards wasn’t as straightforward as I wanted. I wanted a solution where I could push my data into a database and construct dashboards and charts with insights.
That’s when I stumbled upon Metabase. It’s an open source BI tool that allows you to create visually appealing reports from raw SQL queries.
Setting Up Metabase
- I created a PostgreSQL database to store my mutual fund transactions, NAV History, and active SIPs.
- I used MFAPI to fetch NAV history and set up a cron job to update it daily.
- I then deployed Metabase on a VPS, so I could access my dashboards anytime, anywhere.
PS: This was my first real experience with vibe coding, and I’m sold. I spent nearly 24 hours designing a schema, figuring out how to populate NAV data, and deploying Metabase on a VPS. This would have easily taken me at least a week without Cursor. Safe to say, I wouldn’t be cancelling my $20 subscription anytime soon.
Here’s a screenshot of the dashboard I built to visualize the NAV history of various mutual funds. I obviously cannot share my actual investment dashboards, so I hope these should give you a good idea of what’s possible.
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