Understandign the need to reconcile

[Neill]

Hi,

I don't see anything in the documentation on this.
I see that my cash amounts are off in my accounts. The cash is invested in sweep accounts at Fidelity. I have different sweep funds for different accounts.
I download transactions from the internet. Why would the positions not match completely? Do you receive only deltas from the downloads so you don't have enough info?
I understand that with a margin account the cash balances can be confusing.
If I get a mismatch on cash how am I supposed to correct this in fund manager (add fake manual transactions maybe)?
I think I am missing some fundamental information here for me to make sense of the effects I see and how to correct them.
Thanks.
Neill.

[Mark]

Hi Neill,

If you only retrieved transactions, and did not retrieve all the way back to account inceptions, your balances will be off. This would happen because you don't have all your transactions. Your balances as of any particular date are a sum of all your prior recorded transactions. (Yes, this is like only retrieving deltas.)

If you use the New Portfolio Wizard instead, you can retrieve "Transactions and Positions". In this case, FM will retrieve all available transactions, and your current positions. If necessary it will make an adjustment entry to get your current positions correct, accounting for any transactions it was not able to retrieve. Different brokers keep your transaction history for different amounts of times. Some are as short as 90 days, some keep it for your full account history. For some more info on this, see the documentation on the New Portfolio Wizard:

http://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/help/dlg_npw.html

For an explanation of how the default cash account feature works, please see this documentation:

http://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/help ... _cash.html

Your cash balance is just like any other investment, where the balance is determined by the sum of all your recorded transactions up to any given date. You just need to make sure you have all your cash transactions recorded. Setting up your default cash accounts to match how your broker records things is key here.