Moneydance Extension: Security Price Entry

by Tom Edelson

Links: Tom Edelson's home page; Tom Edelson's LiveJournal


Status: this extension is working in my home environment, but is not yet available for general distribution.

Its purpose is to make it easier to enter updated prices for securities that you own.  It's for people who need to do this manually, or just prefer to.  In particular, it's designed for someone who gets a monthly brokerage statement, showing the prices of each security owned as of the last day of the preceding month, and wants to enter those prices with that "as-of" date (while, usually, also making them the "current" prices of the respective securities).

The Hard Way

This is already possible in Moneydance, of course, but it's too much work.  For each security separately, you must:

(Special note, especially to the people at Moneydance.com: if I have misrepresented this ... that is, if Moneydance already provides an easier way to do this than the one I've described ... please do let me know.)

The Easier Way

The extension, when invoked, displays a single window in which you can enter prices for all your securities.  The central feature of the user interface is a three-column table.  The first column is preloaded with the names of all the securities listed in your Moneydance file, and the second with their current prices, as previously recorded in that file.  The third column consists of blank cells where you can enter new prices.

There's also a data entry field for the "as-of date".  This defaults to the last date of the previous month.  You can change this if you need to, but if so, you only have to do it once, rather than doing it for each security.

The window also provides a check box, labeled "Also set these prices as 'current'".  This is checked by default.  You would uncheck it if, for instance, you were "back-filling" your price data: entering data from an older statement, when you had already done so from a newer one.

To complete the user interface, there's an "Apply" button and a "Close" button.  When you click "Apply", any valid prices that you have entered are written into the in-memory Moneydance data, so that they will become part of the file on disk the next time you save it.  Cells that you have left blank in the "New Price" column will effectively be ignored, as will any in which you've entered text which doesn't make up a valid decimal number.

If you've left "Also set these prices as 'current'" in effect, then the middle ("Current Price") column will also be updated with any changed values when you click "Apply".

That's it, in a nutshell.  If you'd like to try it, write to me (edelsont here at well.com) and I'll get you set up.


This page created: 2008-07-23

This page last modified: 2010-08-20