Looking for a investment Ledger

[rkser]

I am searching for a personal Ledger for recording & maintaining buy/sell records of our investments at the 3 Brokers I use.

I forgot about a sale of ETF shares at Vanguard I did earlier in the year, & after finding out, I am now doing tax loss harvesting for. Better finding out now rather than after the year's end.

We are almost out of Vanguard now to mostly Fidelity & some IRAs at Schwab. A point in favor of consolidating all accounts with a single Broker

I will appreciate if anyone can recommend a personal ledger they use for recording transactions.

If I have all our Schwab & Vanguard accounts linked to Fidelity, will that become a DIGITAL LEDGER OF SORTS ?
Does anybody use the Full View feature available in Fidelity to have a comprehensive view of all accounts at a single place. ??

Is writing on a piece of paper or a digital record better than the best memory in the world ??
I dread the day when I keep forgetting these investment sales I make

Thankyou for your feedback in advance

 

[COcheesehead]

I don’t have a solution for you, but examples like yours are why we consolidate into a single brokerage. Tax time is a joy as well.

 

[latexman]

Make one in Excel?

 

[DrRoy]

Make one in Excel?

+1

 

[Midpack]

Make one in Excel?

+2. Is the OP asking for a paper ledger recommendation? I can’t imagine, I’ve been using spreadsheets for tracking our finances for 15 years, we eliminate paper records (and snail mail) as much as possible.

 

[levindb]

Your custodians should all have an option on their websites to view your past transactions. You can normally set a date range or select a calendar year. At that point, you can export/download the information into a spreadsheet and then filter the rows based on the column that says SOLD as the activity type.

You may also be able to filter the activity list on the custodians' websites before downloading...and just grab the list of sales. Print it off you prefer hard copy.

Do this monthly, quarterly, towards the end of the year for tax planning...whatever helps you sleep at night.

 

[Kings over Queens]

Make one in Excel?

That's what I did.

 

[The Cosmic Avenger]

I agree, electronic is the way to go. It's not only easier to store, it's much easier to find something! I export and save all my statements in PDF format, but I believe I could also do so in Excel, in which case I could combine them into one spreadsheet for all accounts and institutions. Not trivial, but not that hard, just add columns for account # and institution. The biggest issue I see is that if you use this to keep a running balance across accounts, which is the only reason I can think of to keep all your accounts on one ledger, it won't help you see individual account performance, or those that might approach a minimum balance.

Fidelity does offer a Full View that shows all transactions across all accounts, even outside ones if you link them, but I just did an export and it uses a short nickname for the account, not the account number, which makes it hard to tell which is which, although you might be able to rename them.

 

[target2019]

Download transactions quarterly or monthly. Open with Excel or Sheets and consolidate.

I do have a notebook diary on my desk, and write about things in there. But it's not searchable.

Schwab has a realized gains tab, and I check that from time to time.

 

[Montecfo]

E-Trade has a tax gain/loss ledger in the tax section of reporting. I use that to keep track of short term and longterm gains and losses for tax reporting. You can download to excel, etc.

I would expect other brokers have something similar. No need to reinvent the wheel.

 

[pb4uski]

Quicken. Link each account to Quicken, import transactions and then run reports to your heart's content.

 

[rkser]

Quicken. Link each account to Quicken, import transactions and then run reports to your heart's content.

DW downloads banking transactions into Quicken, may be I can download the investment transactions too & get my reports of the yearly cap gains & losses.

As I am transferring the investments out of Vanguard into different Brokers, I forgot the capital loss at Vanguard.

I am not getting any younger, I appreciate your suggestions for keeping the tab on current Cap Gain/Loss.

Thanks again

 

[pb4uski]

Another approach is just to periodically run a YTD capital gain/loss report on the broker website for each account and review the results.

 

[lem1955]

Quicken. Link each account to Quicken, import transactions and then run reports to your heart's content.

+1 Automatic reconciliation!

 

[rkser]

As DW uses Quicken on her laptop for the Banks we have, I am trying to setup Quicken on the Web & use it on my Laptop for updating our investment accounts.

Has anyone on the forum used quicken on the web ? Any glitches to expect in this kind of a set up with Quicken on the Web ?

Thanks

 

[rkser]

Quicken does not want to connect to Fidelity

 

[pb4uski]

Quicken does not want to connect to Fidelity

Works for me. Perhaps you can Reset under the Online Services tab under Account Details. If that doesn't work then Deactivate and re-establish Set up online.

 

[rkser]

Thanks pb4, I am getting ahead gradually

 

[socca]

... Is writing on a piece of paper or ?? ...

I chuckled when I read the title of this thread. It took me back to when I was a kid and saw my grandfather's hand-written account ledgers for the family business on his desk. My grandfather was an early adopter of the personal computer for business records - someone created a custom farm management program for the Apple II. I remember him dutifully typing away on his primitive (by modern standards) PC.

My grandfather was a grouchy guy. If I had to keep business records by hand I'd be grouchy, too.