Every investor starts with a spreadsheet, and every spreadsheet is wrong by the third month. Not because people are careless, but because manual tracking fails in a specific and entirely predictable way.
In short
- Spreadsheets drift because updating them is a chore you do after the interesting part.
- The error is rarely the price. It is the quantity, and that one compounds.
- A read only broker connection removes the data entry, not your control.
- You can disconnect whenever you like, and nothing you typed yourself is touched.
How the drift actually happens
A spreadsheet is accurate the day you build it. Then you buy more of something and update it that evening. Then you buy again and update it the next week. Then a rights issue changes your share count, or a dividend is reinvested, or you trim a position on your phone during a commute.
None of those moments feel like bookkeeping. They feel like investing. The recording happens afterwards, if at all.
Prices are not the problem
Most people assume the stale part of a spreadsheet is the price. It usually is not, because prices are easy to refresh and obviously wrong when they are old.
The quantity is the dangerous field. A wrong share count does not look wrong. It produces a total that is plausible, an allocation that is plausible, and a return figure that is confidently incorrect. You will act on it without ever suspecting it.
A stale price looks stale. A stale quantity just looks like a number.
What a connection changes
| By hand | Broker connected | |
|---|---|---|
| After you trade | You remember, or you do not | Quantities update on their own |
| Your total value | An approximation | Matches what your broker reports |
| Corporate actions | Easy to miss entirely | Reflected in the position |
| Dividend history | Typed in from statements | Pulled in where your broker exposes it |
| Effort per month | An hour you resent | None |
What it does not change
A broker connection is read only. TruVest can see what you hold. It cannot place a trade, move money, or see your login details, and that is enforced at the connection level rather than being a promise about how we behave.
Read only means read only. We can see what you hold. We cannot touch it.
Holdings you entered yourself stay yours. If you track something your broker does not know about, whether that is a private holding, property or an asset held elsewhere, it sits alongside the synced positions and is never overwritten.
Setting it up
- Open the import screen and choose your brokerage.
- Authorise the connection with your broker directly. Your credentials go to them, never to us.
- Your holdings appear, usually within a minute.
- Pull to refresh whenever you want. It reconciles quantities, not just prices.
Disconnecting
You can disconnect at any time from the same screen. Doing so removes the holdings that came from your broker and leaves anything you entered manually untouched, so you are never trapped into keeping a connection you have stopped wanting.
If you are still setting up an account in a market you do not live in, the paperwork guide is the place to start. If you are earlier than that, what actually happens when you buy a share covers the ground underneath all of this.