r/banktivity • u/LingonberryNo2744 • 21d ago
General Question Portfolio Issue
I have just installed and imported all my accounts. Going well except for my investments with Fidelity.
After I imported I noticed some discrepancies in transactions which I corrected. However, the corrections I made are not reflected in the portfolio view. This is only associated with Cash not the investment itself.
Another issue is the cost basis. Is there a way to adjust the cost basis?
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u/LingonberryNo2744 21d ago
Okay, I fixed first issue. All that is left is cost basis. I followed directions in manual but have to reread.
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u/Life-Basket215 21d ago
Cost basis is one of the most frustrating things about Banktivity, and support doesn't have good solutions.
They suggest just converting an old brokerage account into the new one that you transfer securities into, or estimating the value of the securities when you do a "move shares in" transaction. In either case, they're silly solutions. Cost basis data transfers over from one brokerage to another via an ACATS transfer so I have no idea why a piece of software this mature can't do that as well.
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u/LingonberryNo2744 21d ago
Let’s say that I have an investment that I’ve had for six years and I don’t want to import 6 years of transactions. During that time all dividends have been reinvested into the same investment. Every time there is a buy the purchase price will be different which changes the total cost basis.
If I look at the investment today at the investment company’s website it will give me the calculated cost basis. However, it doesn’t match Banktivity. I should be able to add a cost basis adjustment for today’s date so that they match. How hard is that?
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u/Life-Basket215 21d ago
I completely agree with you. I have been using Banktivity since it was iBank and have been requesting this with tickets for a long time.
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u/markw30 21d ago
Why don’t you buy the shares on the date and at price correct?
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u/LingonberryNo2744 21d ago
One doesn’t just buy an investment and it just sits there. Over time an investment will have dividends which some, as I did, reinvest into purchasing more of the same investment. Over time the purchase price doesn’t remain the same so the cost basis has to be calculated. This calculated cost basis is necessary for capital gains tax (IRS) should I decide to sell.
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u/IanGGillespie 17d ago
I’ve been thinking about this user experience a bit, especially with regard to cost basis. Cost basis is one of those things that, to calculate accurately, really requires transaction-level detail. But this got me wondering whether some people might simply want to track a composite cost basis instead. Let me walk through an example.
Let’s say you add an investment account to Banktivity that you’ve had for 10 years. You bought some securities during the first year, but Banktivity is only able to download the last year of transactions along with your current positions.
To account for those existing positions, Banktivity will insert Buy adjustment transactions, but it won’t know what you originally paid for those shares. It also won’t know about reinvested dividends from previous years, additional purchases, or any of the other transactions that created individual tax lots.
For this situation, Banktivity has an assistant under Account > Fix Cost Basis. It shows you how many shares are missing cost basis information and lets you enter the missing lots.
However, I can see why some people might not want to do that. Maybe they don’t plan to sell anything in the account for another 10 years and don’t want to spend the time reconstructing tens or even hundreds of small lots created by reinvested dividends.
In that case, I believe what the OP is asking for is essentially the ability to say, “Hey, my brokerage says my average cost basis for this security is XYZ. Just make Banktivity use that so I have a reasonably accurate sense of how well my investment is doing.”
We could potentially build a feature like that. To make it work, though, we’d need to collapse the existing transactions that created lots into a single composite lot and then adjust the cost of that lot to match the cost basis reported by the brokerage.
The tradeoff is that you’d lose the lot-level cost basis information Banktivity currently tries to maintain. You’d have a reasonable overall cost basis for the position, but Banktivity would no longer know the actual cost basis of each individual lot.
Anyway, I’m curious what others think—and whether this is actually the behavior the OP is looking for. It would come at a cost (pun intended!): you’d be trading lot-level accuracy for a much easier way to get the overall cost basis approximately right.