I'm starting to use Skrooge to track investments. I decided to start with a simple case: my wife's tax-deferred retirement account.

I've figured out "units," I think. Each security is a "unit," and the download values in my default currency is nice once I figured it out*. However, I haven't figured the best way to buy, sell and reconcile securities. It looks like I should create a cash account denominated in my default currency (USD), and also an investment account for each security denominated in the "unit" of the security. By having one account per unit, I can reconcile the balances the way they are reported to me, i.e., in shares rather than dollars. But it's tedious and busy to have so many accounts (8 so far for this one retirement plan).

On the other hand, If I have a single investment account denominated in dollars, the only place to find my current share balances is the "units" page. Reconciliation by shares becomes a manual process in that case. It's also a little hit-and-miss, since the broker rounds differently than I do. Also, getting the dollar amount of the transaction and the share amount to agree with my statements is difficult, since I can't find a way to enter the price of a buy/sell operation. As far as I can tell, Skrooge pegs the price to the nearest value it has for the unit, and adjusts the value of the transaction to match.

Clearly, I'm not doing this in the optimal fashion. What have I misunderstood or missed in this process? What's the preferred/intended way to keep track of investments in Skrooge?

Thanks

*BTW, I found a bug in error handling in the unit value download: I entered a complete URL (instead of the symbol to look up) in the "Internet Code" box on the Manual/Share editor on the Units page and clicked "Download". This caused Skrooge to give me the busy indicator for a few minutes and then crash. I realize I was entering the wrong thing in the box, but a message to the user might be a clearner way to handle that.

rbruce wrote:If I have a single investment account denominated in dollars, the only place to find my current share balances is the "units" page. Reconciliation by shares becomes a manual process in that case. It's also a little hit-and-miss, since the broker rounds differently than I do. Also, getting the dollar amount of the transaction and the share amount to agree with my statements is difficult, since I can't find a way to enter the price of a buy/sell operation. As far as I can tell, Skrooge pegs the price to the nearest value it has for the unit, and adjusts the value of the transaction to match.

Okay, looks like this approach (investment account denominated in currency) is not the way to go. Reconciliation would be done on the total value of the shares held at the most recent valuation that Skrooge knows. This may or may not be the valuation available from broker/bank because 1: broker's value may be several days or weeks old, and 2: they may be rounding the value differently. Also, I can't look at the "units" page to check that holdings of each unit agree with the broker, since the same unit could be held in multiple accounts and the units page shows the total owned in all accounts. A possible work-around for this would be to create an instance of the unit for each account: e.g. GOOG-broker-1 and GOOG-broker-2 for my holdings of Google, Inc in each of two brokerage accounts. But this is starting to get really complicated.

So the best I've got for now is have one Skrooge account for each equity unit owned in each "actual" brokerage account it's held in. Unfortunately, this will create an ever-growing list of accounts as equities are bought and sold, so I still don't think I've found the optimal method. If anyone else has figured out the right (or better) way to do this, I'd appreciate hearing your advice.

Thanks