Correcting Inconsistencies in your Portfolio

You may, while building and maintaining your portfolios in StockMarketEye, see what look like discrepancies in certain areas of your data. For example:
  • The Totals line may look off.
  • The report values might not coincide with what you'd expect.
  • The market value chart might have a value that is different from what you see in the reports or Prices view.
  • Your Prices view does not reconcile with what is on your brokerage statement.
These are only a few examples meant to illustrate the variety of places that discrepancies can appear.
The following sections will help explain where these inconsistencies come from and what you can do to fix them.

Background

Your StockMarketEye portfolios consist of 2 parts:
  1. Your current holdings - displayed in the Prices/Fundamentals views,
  2. Your transaction history - that is, the historical record of activity that occurred in your portfolio, available in the Transactions report.
All other reports, totals, charts and performance numbers are calculated from these 2 parts.
Both parts are important to the calculation of reports and totals. However, the Prices view (i.e. your current holdings and cash) is the result of all the past activity that occurred in your portfolio. That is, if you started with an empty portfolio and applied every historical transaction to the portfolio, it would result in what you see in the current Prices view. You can even completely rebuild the Prices view solely from the transactions. Thus the base building block (i.e. the most fundamental piece of data) in StockMarketEye is a transaction (i.e. buy, sell, dividend, split, etc).
When you add transactions to your portfolio, they are recorded in the Transactions report and automatically applied to your current holdings in the Prices view. You add transactions to your Portfolio in one of 3 ways:
  1. Manually via the buttons on your Portfolio's toolbar,
  2. By importing transactions from data files (CSV, QIF, OFX/QFX),
  3. By importing transactions from a brokerage.
Because transactions are the blocks on which the current holdings, reports, totals, charts and performance numbers are built, any incomplete or incorrect transactions can lead to inconsistencies in one or more places in StockMarketEye. Thus it is important to maintain a complete and correct set of transactions in your StockMarketEye portfolio.

Locating the Root Cause of Inconsistencies

The first step in dealing with inconsistencies is to locate their root cause. Depending on where you see the inconsistencies, here are some tactics you can use to narrow down the origins of the issue.
  • If the issues you're seeing are in a Portfolio Group, try to determine which individual portfolio of the group is the cause. Portfolio Groups do not have their own holdings or transactions. Rather, they combine them from the individual portfolios in the group. So issues in a Portfolio Group generally stem from inconsistencies in one or more of the individual portfolios of the group.
  • If the issues you're seeing are in an individual portfolio, try to determine which individual holding or ticker symbol is affected. Sometimes it will be a specific holding that is affected, other times it might be the Totals that are affected. If possible, determine which ticker symbol is involved with the inconsistency.
  • Use the Back-in-Time report to find out when the inconsistency first appeared. You can move forward or backward in time in this report. Start by going back a month at a time till you don't see the inconsistency, then move forward by weeks or days till you've narrowed it down to a specific day.
  • Once you have a better understanding of the issue, go into the Transactions report of the individual portfolio. The Transactions report has powerful filters that make it easy to filter down to just the relevant transactions.
    • If you know that the inconsistency involves 1 ticker symbol, you can select that ticker symbol in the "Symbols" filter at the top.
    • If the inconsistency appears to be with a certain type of transaction (for example, an issue with dividends), you can use the "Transaction Types" filter to select just the transaction types involved (ex. Dividends and Reinvested Dividends).
    • You can also use the "Date Range" to get just the transactions that occurred during a specific time period. This is useful if you've used the Back-in-Time report to see when the inconsistency started.

Verifying Transactions

When you've located the possible transactions that are causing the inconsistency, we recommend going over them one-by-one to verify their details. Although transactions have many different fields, the most important fields (i.e. columns) to verify are:
  1. Date - The date on which the transaction occurred.
  2. Type - The type of the transaction, such as Buy, Sell or Dividend.
  3. Symbol - The ticker symbol associated with the transaction.
  4. Net Total - The total value of the transaction including costs.
Note that StockMarketEye matches buys to sells using the ticker symbols, which must match exactly. You can change the ticker symbol in a transaction if needed.
Also note that the transaction's date is important. Transactions are executed in chronological order. Sells can not come before Buys. Dividends can come after Sells, although this is rare.

Modifying Transactions

Once you've located the cause of an inconsistency, you can modify and correct the specific transaction or transactions that have an issue.
If you're in the Transaction report itself, you can modify any transaction there by double-clicking on the transaction or selecting it and using the "More" button on the toolbar then selecting Show Transaction Details... in the dropdown menu. This will open the transaction's Details window where you can make any changes necessary.
From the Prices view, you can edit a holding's underlying purchase transaction via the "Details" button on the toolbar. That will also open the transaction's Details window where you can make changes.

What If The Transactions Are All Correct, But I Still See an Inconsistency?

If the transactions in the Transactions report are complete and correct, you can rebuild the Prices view from the transactions.

What If I Think It's A Calculation Error in StockMarketEye

No software is perfect and StockMarketEye is no different. If you think you've found a bug in the way StockMarketEye computes something, we'd like to hear about it. Please follow the steps on our page: How To Report Calculation Bugs

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