The spreadsheet I don't open anymore

The payday rush

For three years, this is what payday looked like.

Your salary has been paid. The phone would buzz, and whatever I was doing — in the middle of a conversation with my daughter, mid-sentence with my partner about something else entirely — would stop. I’d say one minute, which was a lie, and head for the laptop.

The spreadsheet was already prepared. Days earlier, when the price action was telling me one thing, I’d filled in the month’s allocations: how much to BTC, how much to ETH, how much to a smaller bag. Market or limit for each row. Target prices for the limits. Notes about why this month’s mix was different from last month’s.

The plan was calm. The execution wasn’t. Salary lands → race to deposit on Bitvavo → race to deposit on Kraken → race to place fifteen orders before the market “moved away from me.” The clock in my head said every minute I wasn’t deployed was a minute I was losing on a price that might never come back this low.

Holiday allowance was worse. Bigger amount, same race. In May, when vakantiegeld lands, the spreadsheet would have been worked over for a week. The moment the money hit, I’d be on the laptop until everything was placed.

That was the most expensive part — not the money I was probably mispricing on rushed market orders, but the version of me I was being. One minute with the laptop while my kid waited. I just need to set this one limit before dinner. The bank notification was a starting gun, and I lined up for it every month.

What the spreadsheet was actually doing

The spreadsheet was answering one question, badly: where should this month’s fresh capital go?

The version of me filling it in a few days before payday was making three decisions, all from a calm chair, all about a market I couldn’t see in advance:

Which coin needs more capital right now? — I’d guess, based on price moves I half-remembered.
Market or limit? — I’d guess, based on whether I thought the price was likely to come back down this week.
How much per slot? — I’d guess, based on how the previous month’s slots had filled.

None of those guesses were terrible. None were great either. The spreadsheet structure made it look like a reasoned process, but it was three guesses dressed up as a budget.

Worse, the limit orders that didn’t fill in seven days were just… gone. Capital I’d “allocated” to ETH at -3% that didn’t drop -3% sat as free EUR in the exchange wallet, doing nothing, while the next month’s spreadsheet pretended the allocation had happened.

The version I have now

Today, the salary notification arrives and… nothing happens.

I see it. I’m glad it’s there. Whatever I was doing keeps happening. Sometime later — that evening, the next day, whenever I have ten quiet minutes — I open the bank app, send the monthly amount to Bitvavo, send a smaller chunk to Kraken, and close the bank app.

Then I open Aurono and go to Lab → Rebalance.

The left column shows the strategies that need capital, sorted by urgency — the most desperate ones at the top. The right column shows where capital is sitting unused. After my Sunday deposit, the top entry on the right is Unallocated exchange balance — €X just landed on Bitvavo.

I match them up. The strategy at the top of the left column is usually the one that’s missed the most buys this week. Its card tells me the story in one breath: “Underwater — price is 6% below your average cost. Missed 2 buying opportunities this week. Needs €10 per buy. Only €0.24 free.” I pick it. The right column filters to Bitvavo sources only — same-exchange rule. I pick the unallocated card. A panel shows what the transfer does in real time: Cautious BTC Daily: unlocks 3 buys. Unallocated: €X → €0. Confirm.

I repeat once for Kraken. Two strategies fed. Two clicks each. No spreadsheet open.

It takes about ninety seconds.

What changed underneath

The spreadsheet and the Rebalancer are answering the same question. The difference is who’s looking at the right information.

The spreadsheet asked me — sitting still on a Sunday — to predict where capital would be most useful over the next thirty days. I had no way to know that. I was guessing from memory.

The Rebalancer answers the same question by looking at the actual state of every running strategy: how many buys each one has skipped recently, how much free capital each has, how far underwater each one is. It isn’t predicting anything. It’s reading the present moment honestly and surfacing the part I care about — here is where your fresh euros will do the most work today.

The decision is still mine. I can ignore the ranking and route the money however I want. But the rank order is doing what the spreadsheet was reaching for, from live data instead of from how I felt at 9:42 on a Sunday morning.

Market vs limit, gone

The other thing I quietly stopped wrestling with: market or limit?

That question only made sense in the old setup because I was placing each buy myself. If I market-buy now, am I paying the top of a wick? If I limit at -3%, will it fill? That’s a real question if you’re the executor.

I’m not the executor anymore. The strategy is. Aurono uses limit orders by design — the rule fires on a candle close, and the order goes in at the closing price. Whether the buy “I’m placing” today is market or limit isn’t a thing I have to decide, because I’m not placing the buy. I’m topping up the pot the strategy will buy from when its rule next fires.

That’s the part the spreadsheet couldn’t reach. The spreadsheet treated each Sunday as the moment of decision. The strategy treats every candle close as a possible moment of decision, on rules I wrote when I was calm. The Sunday top-up just makes sure the strategy has enough EUR to do its job.

What I got back

A bank notification that doesn’t mean anything except money’s in.

The starting-gun feeling is gone. The phone buzzes, I read the line, I put it down. No clock starts. No race to the laptop. No one minute lie. The deployment happens when I get around to it, on rules I wrote when nobody was rushing me — least of all me.

Vakantiegeld is the same. A bigger deposit, the same flow. The “war chest moment” is gone. There’s no war chest. There’s just fresh capital and a tool that already knows which strategies are starving.

I get to stay in the room I was already in when the notification arrived. The crypto allowance still lands where it should. The strategies still get fed. Nothing about the discipline got softer.

The spreadsheet did a job. The Rebalancer does the same job faster, with the information I never actually had in those first frantic minutes after a bank notification — the live state of every strategy I’m running.

I still have the file. I haven’t opened it in months.

Try Aurono for free in shadow mode or buy a license. Full walkthrough in the Capital Rebalancer guide.