Statement of Transactions or Activity Section

...continued from yesterday

Your monthly brokerage statement generally has different sections. There is no uniformity from broker to broker as to what name to give the different sections or what different sections to include in the monthly statement.

The best place to start when checking your monthly brokerage statement is the list of transactions. Most brokers put that list in chronological order.

There is no uniformity in the title for that section of the brokerage statement. I believe the proper accounting title for that section of the statement is "General Journal" or "Cash Journal". Here are some possible names that brokers use for it:
-Transactions This Month
-Account Activity
-Your Activity This Month
-Transactions
-Activity In Your Account From … to ….
-Transactions During Period

What’s common among the various names is the word “Activity” or “Transactions”. So look for one of those two words and you’ll likely find the place to start checking the statement.

That section could be anywhere in the statement: the beginning, the middle, or the end.

After you locate it, compare it to your own records as to the activity in your account.

Usually, but not always, the transactions are listed on the brokerage statement in chronological order. If they are in some other order, such as alphabetic, you’ll need to tell your computer to sort your own record of the transactions, putting them in the same order as on the statement so you can check them. Restore your own records back to chronological order after comparing the brokerage statement to your own records if you had to sort them to put them into the same order as they appear on the brokerage statement.

A shortcut to checking the list of transactions is to merely look at the Closing Cash Balance. If it matches your own records, you can, for the time being, skip checking the entire list of transactions. You’ll have to come back to the list if the next step reveals any missing items.

continued tomorrow ...

Copyright 2006 Raymond T. Lee. All rights reserved.
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