I have a question about the Net Worth template. My broker was merged into another broker and I was required to set up accounts at the new broker. I added the new brokerage accounts and removed the old ones in the Tiller console. I set the “Hide” flag on the old accounts in the Accounts sheet of the Foundation template, so that their final balances wouldn’t show up in the Balances sheet. All is fine, except…
The account switcheroo causes a discontinuity in the Net Worth sheet. The new brokerage accounts are assumed to have zero balances before the date of their first Balance History entries, so prior to the switchover date, the brokerage account totals aren’t included in net worth, and net worth appears to jump suddenly on the switchover date. It seems that the Hide flag doesn’t have quite the right semantics for the Net Worth template.
One fix I’ve considered is to replace all of the Account ID, Balance ID, and Institution values for the old brokerage accounts in the Balance History sheet with the corresponding values for the new accounts, but I’m afraid to break things.
I think this would be a problem for any Tiller solution that provides a view into historical data. It should probably be fixed in a way that isn’t specific to one solution.
That is the first thing that also came to my mind, but there may be a more straightforward and elegant solution here.
Keep the old accounts unhidden. You can add a pair of manual transactions for each migrated account, one for removing the balance from your old account, and another for adding the balance to your new account. This will handle the paper trail of when and where the money went.
Next, if you don’t already have entries in your balance history sheet for zeroing out your old accounts’ balances (it sounds like you don’t have this), you can add those as manual rows on the same date your new accounts’ balances were recorded. This will prevent any unusual spike in net worth.
Ideally, you would have been able to continue to sync your old accounts until the zero balances were recorded, but unfortunately, that’s not always possible if account access is removed before you can sync the data.
Thank you for your advice. I created pairs of transactions for each account to record the transfers, and some entries in the Balance History sheet to zero out the old accounts. I got the desired results, except that I had a bunch of zero-balance accounts from the old broker cluttering up my Balances sheet. I created a group called “Z Obsolete Accounts” and applied it to all the old accounts. This sorted them to the bottom of the Balances sheet, out of the way.
Yes, it would have been nice to be able to pull data from the old accounts after their assets had been transferred. Unfortunately, the old accounts immediately stopped working and this wasn’t possible.
There’s a formula change just for zeroed balances you can make that will ignore zero results for the balance sheet. Randy provided it on this thread make that simple change and your balances sheet will ignore these accounts from clogging your sheet.