Offline Investment Account With Balance Only

pawanvora

Is it possible to create an offline investment account and provide just the balance instead of all the holdings (or transactions).

I was able to do so in Quicken for Mac, but for Windows, it doesn't offer me an option to just enter the balance.

I just want it to track my net worth and it'd be cumbersome to add 100+ holdings one at a time.

Thanks.

Rocket J Squirrel

You can set the account to "Simple" rather than "Complete" tracking.

First, go to Edit > Preferences > Investments and check "Enable simple investing" if it's not already checked.

Next, go to the account's Details page and change its Tracking Method to Simple.

Voilà, no more transactions, just an overview.

Jim_Harman

But in Simple mode it still wants to know what your holdings are, so it can update your balance as the security prices change. This is convenient if there are not many securities or trading or reinvested dividends in the account, but it can be cumbersome if there are a lot of securities and/or the share balances are changing.

It sounds like @pawanvora just wants to see the account's balance with as little manual updating as possible.

One way to do this would be to create the offline account with no securities, just cash, and use Update cash balance from the account's gear menu each month to match the balance on the statement. One downside of this approach is that if you look at your asset allocation, your cash will be overstated.

Another way to do it would be to create the offline account and add one share of a made-up security. Set the share price to the dollar value of the account and update it each time you receive a statement. To keep your asset allocation valid, you can set the security's asset allocation to match that of the account you are tracking.