Accounts

By using accounts you can track how much money you have allocated to your portfolio. You can use this to determine whether or not you have made enough profit to allow you to buy more stocks without having to add more of your own money to the portfolio. Essentially it is a virtual bank account attached to your portfolio.

For example if you started with $10,000 and after a few trades you now have $11606.15 your portfolio has increased by $1606.15. As you still hold stocks worth $9615.80 this gives you $1990.35 of available funds. If you then receive dividends from your stocks you can choose to add the funds to your portfolio.

Currently only a cash account type is available for your use but we are working on also including other account types such as a Margin Loan account. You can have as many accounts as you like within your Portfolio. They can be used to separate your stock information into different categories while still keeping all the information in a single portfolio. Eg. Different brokers, long term / short term trades or even different stock markets.

To configure a new account or modify the details of a current one, click on Accounts | Account Setup.

Here you can add, edit or delete listed accounts by first selecting the account from the list and then clicking on the appropriate button on the left hand side. You can also set which the default account is. This is the default account that will be displayed when you load your portfolio.

While most of the account information is shown here, you can see all of the options by editing a current account, or by adding a new account. This includes information such as the account name, description, currency and default exchange. These values determine some of the default settings when working with an account.

The currency needs to be set to the currency that you're dealing with. The default stock exchange is the stock exchange that is associated with this account. This is the exchange that is automatically selected when you add new stocks to your portfolio.

By setting a default brokerage value you will not need to enter in the value on each trade. You have the choice of setting either a fixed value, or a percentage of the transaction.

The warn if insufficient funds option is used for the virtual cash account. If you do not have the required funds on the date of a new stock entry then the funds will be added to your account. If the warn option is active then you will be prompted if you would like to add the additional funds to the account before entering the new stock purchase.

You can also set whether or not dividend amounts are automatically added as extra funds within your account. If you keep the money received for dividends to later reinvest then this option will allow you to track the spare funds without the need to keep them in a separate account.

To effectively use the accounts you will need to set your initial funds that you have to use. If you are entering in all your stock information this will be automatically calculated for you as you enter in the information. Since most people will only start entering in new stocks for the current financial year, you can adjust the initial values by right clicking on the selected account in the list and choosing 'Adjust Balances'.

Here you can set how much you currently have invested, how much it has cost you and the amount of available funds you have.

Once configured these values will be automatically calculated with each trade you make. For example if you do not have enough funds available when entering another trade, it will automatically add the required funds for you.

You can also at any time choose to add, or withdraw funds from the account. This is useful for when you decide to invest more in your portfolio, or pull some of your funds out.

To add funds, click on Accounts | Add Funds. Here you can see what your current balance is. Enter in the date, the amount you would like to add and a description of the transaction. This can be anything you like to describe why you added extra funds.