Accounts

Overview

Accounts are logical wrappers for grouping assets such as investments. This is a structure designed to reproduce the structure of your investments in real life. Most investments are held within accounts provided by investments platforms such as banks and stock brokers. You can often have multiple accounts held with the same investment platform. For example, it is possible to have both a General Investment Account (GIA) as well as accounts for retirement with a single financial institution.

Here are common types of accounts:

  • General Investment Account (GIA) are account to hold investments and are taxed normally
  • Accounts to invest for retirement: SIPP in the UK, 401k in the USA
  • Accounts with tax advantages: ISA in the UK (Individual Savings Accounts)

In general, you will own assets through accounts, in which case these structures just need to reflect the real accounts you have in the real world. But sometimes you may own assets directly without any such structure. Fo example you may have share certificates, or a buy to let property. In these cases you just need to make up accounts that do not exist in reality, and these will just virtual structure you use to group your assets. For example you may decide to create an account identified as BTLP where you hold all your buy to let properties.

Example

Here is how the demo accounts are defined in the example files.

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| ID    | Platform            | TaxScope | Category   | Hidden | Description                              | Purpose                                   |
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| SIISA | Super-Invest-Ltd    | ISA      | Accessible | false  | Tax-free Stocks-and-Share ISA            | Dividend paying stocks free of income tax |
| SIGIA | Super-Invest-Ltd    | GIA      | Accessible | false  | Taxable General-Investment-Account       | Global index funds for long term growth   |
| GBULN | Greater-Bullion-Ltd | GIA      | Accessible | false  | Account to hold physical precious metals | Precious metals for capital preservation  |
| CRYPT | Crypto-Currencies   | GIA      | Accessible | false  | Crypto-currencies on exchange or wallet  | Get exposure to potential price increase  |
| GSIPP | Greater-Invest-Ltd  | SIPP     | Pension    | false  | Self Invested Personal Pension           | Investments for the private pension       |
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Identifiers

Each account must be given a short identifier, as these identifiers will be used to refer to these accounts in other data files. In the example below, each account is identified using a short five letter name such as SIISA. You can put more details about what these accounts are in the description so you can remember what each account is.

Platform

The platform is the name of the financial institution where you hold your account. It can be a bank or a stock broker for example. This information is only recorded to help recognise where the various accounts located. The value you provide in platform has no impact on the program.

Tax scope

Values in the TaxScope column refer to entries defined in the data files for tax scopes. Values in this column must match identifiers as defined in the ID column of the data files for tax scopes. Please refer to the page about tax scopes for more information.

Categories

Each account belongs to a category. These categories are just groups of accounts, and they are used in the reports. You can create any category you like, such as “Pension” and “Accessible” to differentiate the investments that are accessible after retirement age, vs other investments that you can access whenever you want. Or you can use categories to differentiate “Core” vs “Speculative” investments.

Hidden

The “hidden” column must contain either true if you do not want to see details from an account, or false otherwise. This allows you to hide details from legacy accounts that you have closed in order to declutter reports by removing old information which has become irrelevant.