The Best Free Financial Modelling Tools for Students and Junior Analysts

Students and junior analysts face a frustrating contradiction when they start learning financial modelling. Every course, textbook, and tutorial assumes you have a polished Excel setup, access to a Bloomberg terminal, and a clean financial data feed. Most students have none of these things. What they do have is time, curiosity, and — if they pick the right tools — everything they need to build real models.

This is not a comprehensive list of every free tool on the internet. It covers the ones I would actually point someone to if they were starting from scratch: tools that are genuinely useful at a meaningful level, free to use without a credit card, and between them cover the main gaps — modelling environment, data, and learning.

Browser-based modelling: FinModel.co.uk

FinModel.co.uk is a structured financial modelling environment that runs entirely in the browser — no download, no spreadsheet setup, no blank canvas to stare at. You input your assumptions and the platform builds a complete, auditable model around them: a full DCF with WACC and terminal value, trading comps, LBO, and sensitivity analysis, all using the same underlying logic you would find in a professional banking model.

For students who have not yet built a polished personal Excel template — or who are still in the why won’t this circular reference go away phase of their modelling education — this solves a real problem. Instead of spending your first hour constructing a revenue schedule from scratch, you spend it understanding the model structure and testing what happens to the implied valuation when your growth assumptions change. That is actually how you build intuition faster. The platform also produces export-ready output, which matters more than it sounds: if you want to share a model with a recruiter, mentor, or interviewer, a formatted PDF is far better than a half-built personal spreadsheet.

FinModel is the tool I would recommend running alongside the guides on this site. The posts here explain how each model works and why it is built the way it is; FinModel gives you a working version to experiment with from day one.

Best for: Building complete professional-grade models without starting from a blank spreadsheet. Especially useful if you are following along with the DCF, LBO, or trading comps guides here.

Limitations: Fewer customisation options than a hand-built spreadsheet. If you need to wire in unusual model logic or restructure the layout entirely for a specific deal, you will eventually want to do that in Excel. Think of it as the place to build understanding and run scenarios — not as a replacement for learning the craft.

Spreadsheet tool: Google Sheets + GOOGLEFINANCE

If you are going to work in finance, you need to spend time in a spreadsheet. Excel is the industry standard and you should learn it — but Google Sheets is free, runs in any browser, and has one feature that Excel does not: the =GOOGLEFINANCE() function.

GOOGLEFINANCE pulls live and historical price data directly into your spreadsheet. Type =GOOGLEFINANCE("AAPL","price") and you get the current share price. Add a date range and you get a full historical price series you can use to calculate returns, beta, or correlations. It is not Bloomberg, but for building a simple trading comps model or a DCF with real market inputs, it removes the manual data-copying step entirely.

Best for: Building and testing models without paying for anything. Particularly useful for anything that needs live or historical price data without a separate data source.

Limitations: GOOGLEFINANCE covers price and market cap data — it does not pull income statement or balance sheet figures. For fundamental financial data you will need a separate source (see Macrotrends and TIKR below).

Excel for students: Microsoft 365 Education

Excel is still the tool you will be using when you get a job, so learning it is non-negotiable. The good news is that if you are at a university with a Microsoft agreement — which most UK and US universities have — you can access Microsoft 365 for free, including the full desktop version of Excel.

Check your university’s IT portal before paying for anything. A surprisingly large number of students go months without realising they already have access. If you are eligible, the full desktop app is meaningfully better than the web version for anything involving complex formulas, data tables, or VBA.

Best for: Building proper hand-built models with full formula control. Essential practice for any role in banking, PE, FP&A, or corporate finance.

Limitations: If you do not have access through your institution, the web version of Excel (free with any Microsoft account) is significantly stripped down — named ranges, data tables, and several array functions behave differently or are missing. Do not try to learn financial modelling on the web version.

Data source: Macrotrends

Macrotrends is a free, no-account-required website that compiles historical financial statement data for publicly listed US companies. You can pull annual and quarterly income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements going back 10 to 20 years, with an option to export to CSV.

It is not the most elegant interface in the world, but the data is reliable, the coverage of large-cap US companies is comprehensive, and it is genuinely free with no paywall. For building a DCF model using real company data — rather than illustrative numbers from a tutorial — Macrotrends is often the fastest starting point.

Best for: Historical income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow data for US-listed companies. Sufficient for building DCF inputs from scratch.

Limitations: Primarily US-focused. International coverage is patchy. No pre-formatted ratios or comps-ready output — you will need to calculate multiples yourself.

Data source: TIKR (free tier)

TIKR is a financial data platform aimed at investors and analysts. The free tier gives access to financial statements, consensus estimates, and basic valuation multiples for a large number of companies — with more international coverage than Macrotrends and a considerably cleaner interface.

The free tier has restrictions: limited historical depth and limited screener access. But for a student building a DCF or comps model on a well-known company, it covers what you need. The layout is also closer to what you would see in a Bloomberg or CapIQ terminal, which makes it a useful stepping stone for anyone who has not used professional data tools yet.

Best for: Financial statement data plus analyst estimates in one place. More useful than Macrotrends if you are working on a non-US company or want to see consensus revenue and EBITDA estimates alongside historical actuals.

Limitations: Free tier limits historical data depth and restricts screener functionality. Requires creating an account.

Learning platform: Corporate Finance Institute (CFI) — free tier

The Corporate Finance Institute has a genuinely good free introductory course on financial modelling. The free content walks through the basics of building a three-statement model in Excel, with video explanations and downloadable files you can work through at your own pace.

The paid tiers are expensive and, for most students, unnecessary. But the free introductory modules — particularly the Excel fundamentals and the three-statement model walkthrough — are worth going through if you want a structured path before diving into more complex models. CFI also has a useful library of free articles on individual concepts, which is worth bookmarking as a reference.

Best for: A structured starting point if you have never built a model before and want guided instruction rather than working through blog posts and tutorials independently.

Limitations: The free content is genuinely limited — the full course library requires a paid subscription. Some examples are US-centric (GAAP accounting, US tax assumptions). Good for the fundamentals; not a substitute for building models with real data.

A note on what is missing from this list

You will notice that Bloomberg, CapIQ, and Refinitiv are not here. They are the tools used by professionals, and if your institution provides access, use them. But they are not free, and they are not where students should focus their energy early on. Get comfortable with the fundamentals using the tools above. The professional data terminals will make sense quickly once you know what you are actually looking for in them.