Combine Brokerage Import with Importing Transactions from an Investment File

StockMarketEye supports downloading your data directly from certain US-based brokerages. When you do this, you don't have to enter data by hand, but can simply download the latest transactions from your brokerage periodically to keep your StockMarketEye portfolio up-to-date.

Unfortunately, most brokerages do not allow you to download a complete transaction history from your account. They will only allow you to download a limited amount of transactions - for example, those that happened within the last 3-months or last 2-years, depending on the brokerage's own limit. For this reason, when you initially download the data from a brokerage, StockMarketEye will create placeholder transactions for any holdings that did not have a corresponding purchase transaction in the download. 

Completing Your Historical Transaction Record Via File Import

If you have a more complete historical transaction record for your account, such as from another investment program (Quicken, etc) or from the brokerage itself, you can combine those transactions with the transactions that were downloaded from your brokerage by StockMarketEye. This is very useful as StockMarketEye operates best and calculates returns best when it has a complete transaction history, ideally going back to when you opened the account at the brokerage.

Here's how we recommend combining the external transaction file with those that StockMarketEye can download from the brokerage:

1. Start by importing the portfolio from the brokerage.
2. Go into the Transactions report of the new portfolio and add the Comments column. The Comments field will contain a note about a particular transaction having been created as a "placeholder" transaction.
3. If your external transaction file is an OFX or QIF file, import that file into a separate portfolio. See here for how to import QIF files and here for OFX files.
4. In the portfolio you created in step #3, go to the Transactions report and select all of the transactions that are included in the Transactions report of the portfolio imported in step #1. Then delete those transactions from the portfolio from step #3.
5. Now export the Transactions report of the portfolio from step #3 to a CSV file. See this page for how to export transactions to a CSV file. Be sure to select the option, "Transactions report with import compatible columns."
6. Back in the imported portfolio from step #1, in the Transactions report, select and delete the placeholder transactions.
7. Then import the CSV file created in step #5, which contains the additional transactions that were not able to be downloaded by the brokerage-import feature.
8. Finally, verify that all of the transactions in this portfolio's Transactions report are complete and correct, then rebuild the portfolio's Prices view from the Transactions.

After the import, you should have a complete transactions record of your portfolio and be able to update from brokerage to get the most recent transactions.