Import or type it in?
There are three ways to get your financial data into one place. Most people need all three, applied to different parts of their portfolio.
Manual entry
Section titled “Manual entry”You type in what you own.
Best for: property, fixed deposits, insurance policies, private loans, anything with no statement to import — and for small portfolios generally.
Strengths: total control, no credentials shared anywhere, and the act of entering things forces you to actually look at them. People routinely discover forgotten accounts during manual entry.
Weaknesses: slow at volume, and typos are easy. A misplaced decimal is surprisingly hard to spot later.
If you hold fewer than twenty positions, manual entry is genuinely fine and you can stop reading here for most of your portfolio.
Statement import
Section titled “Statement import”You upload or paste a broker statement and the tool extracts the transactions.
Best for: brokerage accounts with years of history you do not want to retype.
Strengths: fast, and captures history you would otherwise skip. Modern AI-assisted import handles messy PDF layouts that older parsers could not.
Weaknesses: extraction is never perfect. Formats vary wildly between institutions, and there are specific things that commonly go wrong:
- Corporate actions. Stock splits and mergers often import as odd quantities.
- Currency. A statement in one currency for a share priced in another can be misread.
- Fees and charges. Sometimes imported as transactions, sometimes silently dropped.
- Dividend reinvestment. Frequently appears as a purchase with no matching cash movement.
Always verify after importing. Check the final quantity of each holding against your broker’s own figure. If quantities match, the import broadly worked. If they do not, the difference tells you which transaction went wrong.
Redact the statement before uploading if it will pass through any general AI tool — the safety lesson covers what to remove.
Connected accounts
Section titled “Connected accounts”You authorise a read-only connection and balances update automatically.
Best for: crypto exchanges, and banks in regions with mature open-banking coverage.
Strengths: no maintenance. Balances stay current with no effort.
Weaknesses: coverage is uneven, connections break when institutions change their systems, and it requires granting access.
The non-negotiable rule: read-only. When creating an exchange API key, enable reading balances and history, and disable trading and withdrawal. If a service asks for a key with withdrawal rights to display your balance, that is a reason to walk away.
What to use where
Section titled “What to use where”| Part of your portfolio | Best approach |
|---|---|
| Property | Manual, revalued once or twice a year |
| Pension accounts | Manual, updated quarterly |
| Broker with long history | Statement import, then verify |
| Broker, recent or small | Manual |
| Crypto on an exchange | Read-only connection |
| Crypto in self-custody | Manual |
| Fixed deposits | Manual, with maturity date |
| Insurance | Manual |
| Loans | Manual, updated as balances fall |
Verifying, whichever route you took
Section titled “Verifying, whichever route you took”After any bulk import, check these four:
- Total net worth — does it look approximately right? A number wildly off usually means a currency or quantity error.
- Quantities per holding — compare against the source. This catches most import faults.
- Duplicates — importing the same statement twice is a common mistake and doubles a position.
- Currency labels — check that each holding is denominated in the currency you expect.
Fifteen minutes of checking prevents months of decisions based on wrong numbers.
Keeping it current
Section titled “Keeping it current”Once the picture exists, maintenance is small:
- Add transactions when you buy or sell, or import periodically
- Update loan balances as they fall
- Revalue property annually
- Let market prices and exchange rates update themselves
Ten minutes a month, which is the same habit from Module 1.
Practice step
Section titled “Practice step”Pick your most active investment account and get it in — by import if it has long history, manually if it does not.
Then run check number two: does the quantity of each holding match what your broker shows? That single comparison is the difference between data you can trust and data you merely have.
Next: Money in more than one currency — the part that trips up almost everyone with international assets.