by Mark » Thu May 21, 2009 10:26 am
Hi amir,
Thanks for trying out Fund Manager.
When you retrieve transactions & positions Fund Manager requests all available transactions from the broker's OFX server, and the current positions. Different brokers keep your transaction history on their OFX servers for varying amounts of time. Some keep it for as little as 90 days, others keep it for your full account history, it just depends on the broker. In this case, it sounds like you were only able to get transactions for the last year. Fund Manager then automatically records this 'adjustment' transaction to get your balance correct as of today. This 'adjustment' transaction is essentially a combination of all prior transactions up to that adjustment transaction date.
If you have access to the historical transactions prior to this adjustment transaction, you can delete the adjustment transaction, and import or manually enter these older historical transactions. I believe with Ameritrade you can download older transactions through their 'web' server to a CSV file (they only allow you to download 1 year at a time this way). You can massage this file in Excel and then import it with our 'generic' transaction import. This is a little more work, but depending on the number of historical transactions you have it may be easier than manually entering.
Alternatively, you can modify the adjustment transaction to have a purchase price equivalent to the cost basis of those shares. It is a trade off between how much historical accuracy you want versus the effort of getting those older transactions into Fund Manager.