The Domain Portfolio Spreadsheet: Every Column You Need
Every domain investor starts with a spreadsheet, and a well-built one will carry you surprisingly far. The difference between a useful sheet and a graveyard of stale rows is choosing the right columns on day one and being honest about the sheet's two structural weaknesses: it never updates itself, and it never warns you about anything.
Here is the column set that holds up, plus the signals that it's time to graduate to software.
The columns that matter
You want enough columns to answer three questions instantly: what do I own and where, what does each name cost me to hold, and what is my exit plan for it. Anything beyond that is decoration.
| Column | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Domain | The asset. One row per name, no exceptions. |
| Registrar | Where it lives — the first thing you need in any emergency. |
| Acquisition date | Anchors holding period and tax records. |
| Acquisition cost | What you paid: registration, auction price, or purchase price plus fees. |
| Expiry date | The date the registry has — verify it, don't trust memory. |
| Renewal cost | Current annual cost to hold, at the registrar it actually sits at. |
| Total cost basis | Acquisition cost plus every renewal paid so far. |
| Status | Hold / listed / in negotiation / drop at expiry. |
| Sale price target | Your ask, decided calmly — not invented mid-negotiation. |
| Listed where | Marketplaces, lander, or nowhere. Blank means it can't sell. |
| Notes | Inquiries received, offers declined, why you bought it. |
Columns people add and regret
- •Automated valuation numbers pasted in once — they go stale immediately and anchor you to a fiction.
- •Traffic or search-volume columns you'll never re-pull.
- •One tab per TLD or per registrar — filtering a single sheet beats reconciling five tabs.
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Where spreadsheets break down
The sheet is a snapshot of the day you last edited it. Expiry dates move when you renew or transfer; renewal prices drift; a domain you dropped stays in the sheet forever unless you remember to delete the row. None of this announces itself — the sheet looks equally authoritative whether it's current or six months stale.
The second failure is alerting. A spreadsheet will not email you 30 days before a name expires. You can bolt on calendar reminders, but now you're maintaining two systems by hand, and every renewal means updating both.
When to graduate to software
The honest threshold is not a domain count — it's the moment your sheet disagrees with reality and you don't know which rows are wrong. That tends to happen past a couple dozen domains or the moment you hold names at more than one registrar.
A portfolio tool replaces the two things the sheet can't do: it re-verifies expiry and status from the registry on a schedule, and it alerts you before renewals instead of waiting to be opened. Sourdough imports your existing spreadsheet as CSV, enriches every row with live RDAP/WHOIS and DNS data, and starts with a 7-day free trial — so the migration is a five-minute experiment, not a commitment.
Frequently Asked Questions
What columns should a domain portfolio spreadsheet have?
At minimum: domain, registrar, acquisition date, acquisition cost, expiry date, renewal cost, total cost basis, status, sale price target, where it's listed, and notes. Together these answer what you own, what it costs to hold, and what your exit plan is.
How many domains can I manage in a spreadsheet?
There's no hard ceiling, but most investors feel the pain past roughly 25 domains or at the second registrar. The failure isn't capacity — it's that the sheet silently drifts out of sync with the registry and never alerts you to anything.
Should I track cost basis in my domain spreadsheet?
Yes — acquisition cost plus every renewal paid. Without it you cannot compute real profit on a sale, make rational drop decisions, or produce records at tax time. It's the single most commonly missing column.