Account Balance is a unique transaction type designed to help you maintain an accurate balance for accounts where you do not have access to historical transactions or don't need them. This feature creates either a Buy or Sell transaction underneath to reconcile any discrepancies in your balance.
Account Balance updates are particularly useful if you're not interested in tracking every single transaction that contributes to your position. Instead, you're more focused on a general overview of your account. This is often the case with cash accounts, where periodic balance updates are completely fine.
When to use an Account Balance
You can use Account Balance transactions for any type of asset, whether it's to track the initial balance or to record it continously in cases where you don't have access to the full transaction history.
If you update the balance on every day you make a transaction on an account, your performance metrics should be fairly accurate. However, please note that you won't have access to historical performance, fees, and any gains/losses between the closing price and the price you actually paid. On the other hand, you can always create balance updates in the past. Moreover, you can record fees, gains, and losses using the Other transaction type.
The flexibility of Account Balance
One of the best features of Account Balance is its flexibility. If at any point you need more detailed transaction information, you can always add it. The account balances will automatically adjust, and there won't be any discrepancies to reconcile.
On the other hand, you can use them to quickly "fix" a broken history so you can see the current portfolio composition and leave the actual fixing for later.
What an Account Balance records
An Account Balance records the total quantity you hold of one asset, in one account, on one date — not the change. Enter 120 and Capitally compares it against whatever the position held before that date and books only the difference. Enter 0 and the position closes. None of the buys and sells that got you there has to exist.
Required and optional fields
Required: Date, Account, Asset, Quantity. Capitally pre-fills Quantity with the quantity the position holds on the date you pick, so you correct a number rather than compute a delta. On a Value-based asset the same field is labelled Current Value and takes the total value instead of a unit count.
Optional: the market price for that date — labelled Current Market Price, or Market Price on <date> once you back-date the transaction — and Price (cost-basis).
Capitally values the position as market price × quantity × FX rate, all three taken on the transaction's date. Quantity decides how many units you hold; market price decides what one unit is worth. Setting the market price here writes it into that asset's price history, which is how custom assets — property, private funds, collectibles — stay valued. Listed assets already have a price, so leave the field alone unless you are correcting it.
Price (cost-basis) is not the market price
Price (cost-basis) is the average you paid per unit. Fill it in and Capitally reconciles the position's whole principal to quantity × price, the same way Quantity reconciles the balance, so the position shows a real unrealised gain from the day it appears. Leave it empty and the units being added are valued at that date's market price, so the position opens flat.
Removing quantity works the other way round. Units leaving are disposed of at that date's market price, so an Account Balance that lowers a holding realises a gain or loss exactly as a Sell at market would. The field is shown for every asset except cash and Value-based assets.
It takes a formula like any other number field, and the selector at the end of it sets what the number is in — the asset's own currency unless you pick another, or % of face value on a bond quoted against par.
Cash has no price, and -1 is not a workaround
A currency is pinned to a price of 1 in its own currency, so an Account Balance on a cash asset shows a Quantity field and nothing else — the amount is the balance. Both price fields are hidden because neither would change anything.
A price of -1 is not the way to record money you owe. It inverts the value of the transaction and of every return computed from it. Record a debt as a negative quantity at a price of 1 on a custom Loan or Mortgage asset — Capitally treats any position with a negative balance as a liability. See Tracking debt.
Transfer, Account Balance and Buy
Three transaction types change a quantity, and they differ in what they do to cash and to your cost basis.
Transaction | Quantity | Cash | Cost basis and realised return |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adds what you enter | Debits the account by quantity × price, plus fees and tax | Opens at the price you paid |
| Adds or removes what you enter | Untouched, apart from fees and tax | In: that date's market price, unless you enter a price. Out: the units' own opening cost, so nothing is realised |
| Sets the total to what you enter | Untouched | Units added open at that date's market price, or at |
Money left the account to acquire the asset: Buy. Units arrived or left without a purchase — shares moved in from another broker, a deposit into a savings account: Transfer. You know the total but not the movements behind it: Account Balance.
Closing a position
Add an Account Balance with Quantity 0, dated the day the position ended. That covers a deposit that matured, an asset you no longer own, and any position an incomplete import left hanging open. The transaction history survives and the position stops. If the history is worthless to you as well, delete the position instead.
Correcting a balance you got wrong
Open the transaction list and edit the most recent Account Balance on that position. Because the field holds a total rather than a delta, changing that one number is the entire fix — no compensating transaction, no arithmetic. If the wrong number came from double-clicking a position row and you would rather the action had never happened, use Undo from the top-right menu; every change is listed in Changes History.
Updating Balances
There are multiple ways to update account balances.
By Editing a Position
When viewing the Positions tab in Portfolio, you can double click on a row, or choose Edit position from the context menu. You can change both the Quantity and Market Price there, so it's great to quickly update both your account balances and market prices of custom assets.
The quantity and price is set for the date you are currently viewing - so today by default.
You can change that date in the Date Period selector above the graph.
By adding an Account Balance transaction
Add a transaction on the asset and account you want to correct and choose Account Balance as the type. Capitally pre-fills the quantity the position currently holds; replace it with the total you actually hold, and the difference is booked for you. Any past date works, and the same window sets the market price for that date.
+ Add Assetfrom the main menu, or Add transaction from an existing position's context menu.- Pick the asset — the currency for a cash balance, the security for a holding.
- Choose
Account Balanceunder Choose transaction type. - Set the Account and the Date.
- Enter the Quantity: the total on that date, not the change.
- Optionally fill
Price (cost-basis)with the average you paid per unit, and the market price if the asset has no market data of its own.
By Importing Balances from CSV
You can download or prepare a CSV file with columns for Date, Asset Name/Ticker, and Balance. Then just follow the guide on importing from the file. For the Transaction Type you want to choose Account Balance and remember to assign the balance column to Quantity.
This is a great way to import prices for a single asset, but you can also use it to import prices for a bunch of assets. It's especially useful if you have a custom asset like bonds, and your broker provides you with a table of current prices or value of your assets.
Starting from an opening balance
When a broker's export does not reach back far enough, record what you held on the first date it does cover and let the export carry on from there. One Account Balance per security, dated the day before the export's earliest transaction, is a complete starting point — quantities only, with no history behind them.
Import the full history first, oldest file first
Try for the whole history before settling for an opening balance. Import each export separately in chronological order, oldest file first; there is no need to merge them, and importing out of order makes positions reconcile badly. Several brokers force the issue: an IBKR Flex Query exports at most one year at a time, and Schwab history often stops at the TD Ameritrade merger in April 2020.
Overlapping date ranges are safe. Capitally matches an incoming row against what you already have on type, asset and account, then on the broker's own reference id when both rows carry one, and otherwise on date and quantity. A second run adds only the rows that were missing, so re-importing a range you already covered creates no duplicates. See Importing from a broker.
Build the opening positions by hand
For each security you held at the cut-off date, add an Account Balance transaction with the quantity you held on that date. Cash balances get the same treatment on the currency asset. This is the standard fix wherever the online history is short — a TSP account, for example, publishes only a few years, so each of the five funds needs one Account Balance at the start of what you can download.
If you know what those positions cost you, put the average per unit in Price (cost-basis). Leave it empty and the opening position is valued at that date's market price, so it carries no gain from the years you cannot see.
Import the opening positions from a file
Past a handful of positions, put them in a spreadsheet instead. Open Import any data, choose Account balances when asked what the file contains, and map the columns:
- Account and Asset — one row per position
- Account Balance (Quantity) — the quantity held
- Balance Date — the cut-off date, or a column of dates to import a balance history
- Cost Basis (per unit) or Cost Basis (total) — optional, and the only way this path carries what you paid
- Market Price — optional, for assets Capitally has no price data for
Leave both cost-basis columns unmapped and every opening position starts flat, at that date's market price. See Importing from a file.
Purchases made before a stock split
Capitally sources splits from the asset's market symbol and applies them to your positions, so a purchase made before a split has to be entered in the units and prices that were true at the time — unadjusted. Convert the figures your broker shows you today:
- Quantity = adjusted quantity ÷ split ratio
- Price = adjusted price × split ratio
A holding shown today as 40 shares at $100 after a 4-for-1 split was 10 shares at $400 on the day you bought it, so enter 10 and 400 and let Capitally re-apply the split.
If the historical return and the exact cost are not worth the arithmetic, skip it: add an Account Balance with today's quantity, dated one day after the most recent split. You give up the return before that date and keep a correct position.