How to see your investments and accounts from several banks in one place

A current account at one bank, savings at another, ETFs at a broker and a little crypto on an exchange: each app shows its own piece, in its own currency, with its own idea of how you’re doing. Here’s how to put them together into one picture you can trust, without handing anyone your logins.

Why it’s hard to see everything at once

Every bank and broker shows only what it holds. One counts your return since you opened the account, another since January; one shows dollars, another euros. Adding them up in your head, or in a spreadsheet you update twice a year, is how most people end up not knowing what they actually have.

Step 1: list every place your money is

• Current accounts and cards, at every bank.
• Savings accounts and deposits.
• Broker accounts, counting the cash in them and the holdings separately.
• Crypto, on an exchange or in a wallet.
• Cash, and anything else you’d count, like a pension you can look up.

Write down each one’s currency too. That list is the map for everything that follows.

Step 2: one main currency, each account in its own

Pick the currency you think in, and keep every account in its own currency rather than converting it by hand. The totals are then shown in your main currency, at today’s rate for balances and at each day’s rate for spending. Budgeting in multiple currencies goes through why that matters.

Step 3: record investments as trades, not just balances

A holding’s value today is easy to look up. What tells you how it’s doing is what you paid: each buy and sale, with its date, the quantity and the total. From those trades you can work out how many shares you hold, what they cost on average, and your gain, both what you’ve realised by selling and what you haven’t yet.

Your broker’s trade confirmations or transaction history have everything you need. Most people make only a few trades a month, so keeping up takes minutes.

Step 4: value everything at current prices

With the trades recorded, current market prices turn your holdings into a value, and that value sits beside your bank balances in one net worth. That’s the number that answers “what do I have?”, and watching it over months says more than any single account does.

Step 5: compare with a simple benchmark

Is your portfolio doing well? The fair comparison is with what the same money would have made in a broad index, put in on the same days you bought. If the gap is small or negative over a few years, a single low-cost index fund might do the same job with less effort. That’s worth knowing either way.

Step 6: keep it current with little effort

Once a month, import each bank’s statement as a CSV file, and add any trades you made. That’s enough to keep the whole picture current without connecting a single account.

How Consistent does it

In Consistent every account keeps its own currency and adds up into one net worth in your main currency, cash and investments together. Stocks, ETFs, funds and crypto are valued at current prices, refreshed every 15 minutes, from a whole share down to a fraction of a satoshi. You enter each buy and sale; from those it shows your return, rate of return, allocation by holding or by type, and a comparison with a world index or the S&P 500 bought on the same days. A broker’s cash is an account of its own, and a trade can take its money from it.

What it doesn’t do: it never asks for a bank or broker login, so nothing syncs by itself. Bank statements import as CSV files, and trades are entered by hand; it doesn’t import files from brokers. Something without a market price, like a deposit or a pension, can be an account of its own.