Matched Betting Spreadsheet UK: Track Profits Properly

The three reasons people start tracking properly are usually the same: they want to know real net profit (not the bookie balance, which excludes the lay legs sat on Smarkets or Betfair), they want a paper trail for tax questions (matched betting is generally non-taxable in the UK, but evidencing that the deposits are gambling proceeds is much easier with a log), and they want to spot which bookies are about to gub them before it happens - gubbing is a slow drift, not a sudden event, and it shows up in the data weeks before the email arrives.

The fourth reason creeps in once you've been doing this for a while: ROI per hour. An offer that nets £8 isn't worth doing if it took 45 minutes to set up across bookie + exchange + reload checks. With the column structure below, you can sort by £/hour and skip the dross.

These are the columns to put in row 1 of your sheet. The order matters slightly - date first, profit last - but otherwise it's about getting them all in, not optimising the layout.

That's enough to run the basic analyses. The net-profit column carries the financial truth; the others give you everything you need to slice it later. If you're using a calculator (OddsMonkey, Outplayed, or any free oddsmatcher), all of these fields are already there during the bet - you just need to copy them over.

Once you've used the core columns for a couple of weeks, three more start earning their keep:

The fastest way to grasp the format is to see filled rows. Here's how a sign-up qualifier, a free-bet leg, and an acca-refund offer look:

Two takeaways from the examples. First: net profit being negative on row 1 is fine and expected - that's a qualifying loss, the cost of unlocking the free bet, which converts to row 2's £22.45 profit. Sum across both rows and you have your real position on the offer. Second: row 3 shows why "Offer type" is more than cosmetic. Acca refunds have a different risk profile to standard free bets (you can lose more on a bad day, you can win more on a good day), and you'll want to filter by offer type later when you're deciding whether the variance is worth it for your bankroll.

The first month of tracking feels like admin. The third month is where it pays off. Three analyses that need at least 30 rows of data to be meaningful:

Google Sheets is the right default. It's free, syncs to your phone for on-the-go bet logging, and the QUERY function is genuinely useful for slicing the data later. The downside is that if you're tracking a substantial bankroll you may want the file off Google's servers - in which case Excel or LibreOffice locally is a sensible answer.

Notion databases work but are slower for the analyses above. Notion's strength is rich notes, not numerical filtering. If you want a hybrid setup, keep the bet log in Sheets and use Notion for the longer write-ups on which offers you're working through.

Dedicated apps exist (the matched-betting platforms have built-in trackers), but vendor lock-in is a real cost. If you move away from the platform, you usually lose the historical data with it. A spreadsheet under your own ownership survives any platform change.