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Accounts, holdings, and balances

How Chord models accounts, holdings, and balances in its double-entry books.

Last updated October 23, 2026

The numbers on Home only make sense once you know what's behind them. Here's the model.

Account types

Every account sits under one of five roots:

  • Assets — what you have: chequing, savings, investment accounts.
  • Liabilities — what you owe: credit cards, loans.
  • Equity — the balancing side (your Opening Balances account).
  • Income — money coming in.
  • Expenses — money going out.

You can nest accounts under those roots (for example Expenses › Dining) and rename, archive, or delete them. Investment holdings live as a distinct account subtype under Assets — same tree, different way of being valued.

Currencies

Every account has a native currency (CAD or USD). Ledger postings never silently convert; an account's register stays in that account's currency. Conversion happens only when a high-level figure needs a single currency — net worth, allocation, and reports, shown in your profile's default currency. See CAD and USD exchange rates.

Holdings are snapshots, not trades

A holding is a ticker, a share count, and a currency. You edit the share count when it changes instead of logging every buy and sell. This is deliberate: it mirrors a net-worth spreadsheet and skips the lot-tracking grind that makes investment modules hard to live with.

Say plainly what that means: Chord tracks current market value only. There is no cost basis, no realized or unrealized gain/loss, and no dividend ledger.

How holdings are valued

Value is shares × current price, converted to your profile's currency.

  • Equity prices are end-of-day and come from your own market-data key (Alpha Vantage or Marketstack). Crypto prices come from your own CoinGecko key and refresh far more often.
  • USD holdings convert to CAD using the shared FX pipeline (the Bank of Canada daily rate, with a manual override available).

You can always set a price by hand while a key is missing. See Market-data keys and Holdings, prices and crypto.

Balances and net worth

Account balances are computed from postings; Home adds them to holdings at market value and converts to one figure. Because it's a real double-entry ledger, the books balance to zero at all times — the net-worth number is derived, not maintained separately, so it can't drift from the transactions. See What net worth means in Chord.

Troubleshooting

  • A balance looks wrong. Balances are computed from your postings, so a wrong number means a wrong transaction. Check whether a transfer was booked as spending, which currency the account is in, and unfold the row (Return) to inspect its journal.
  • A holding shows no price. You likely have no key for that asset class, or the provider rejected it. See Market-data keys.
  • A number changed after an import. You can undo the batch immediately with ⌘Z, or restore a snapshot — see Backups and restore.

Related

Still stuck?

Email [email protected] with your macOS version and what you were doing.