Tracking multiple investment accounts in one place

Most Canadian investors do not have a portfolio. They have four or five accounts that each believe they are the whole picture.

A TFSA at the bank that opened it first. An RRSP where an employer plan landed. A self-directed account at a discount brokerage. Maybe a spousal RRSP, an FHSA, a RESP. Each institution shows a clean summary of what it holds, and none of them is wrong. But none of them is the thing you need to make a decision.

What only shows up when you aggregate

Your real asset allocation. Each account looks balanced on its own. Combined, they may not be. It is common to discover a portfolio is far more concentrated in one sector or one region than any individual account suggested, because the same broad-market ETF sits in three places while a single-stock position quietly sits in one.

Genuine concentration. A position that is 8% of your RRSP and 25% of your taxable account is neither of those numbers in reality. Concentration risk is a property of the whole, and it accumulates without any single statement showing it.

Overlap between funds. Two ETFs with different tickers and different providers can hold substantially the same companies. Holding both feels like diversification and often is not. This is invisible unless something looks through to underlying holdings across every account at once.

Total fee drag. A 0.65% management expense ratio in one account and 0.06% in another blend into a single number you are actually paying. Over decades the difference compounds into a figure worth knowing.

Correct adjusted cost base. This one is not a matter of convenience. Canada pools identical securities across all your non-registered accounts into a single average cost. If you hold the same security at two brokerages, neither brokerage's book value can be your ACB, because neither can see the other. The correct figure only exists when someone combines them.

Why the spreadsheet stops working

Most people solve this with a spreadsheet, and for a while it is the right tool. It stops being one at a predictable point.

The maintenance is not the hard part — the reconciliation is. Every dividend, every reinvested distribution, every corporate action has to be entered correctly, on the right date, in the right account, or the derived figures drift. The errors are silent. Nothing turns red.

The second problem is that a spreadsheet records what you tell it. It cannot tell you that a return-of-capital distribution in March should have reduced your cost base, or that a purchase in your RRSP triggered the superficial loss rule against a sale in your taxable account thirty days earlier.

What aggregation does not fix

Being able to see everything at once does not make the underlying data correct.

Positions transferred between institutions frequently arrive with a cost base that was estimated, reset to the transfer-date price, or dropped entirely. Aggregating three accounts where one has a wrong cost base produces one total with a wrong cost base.

Nor does aggregation resolve which figures are authoritative. Your brokerage's statements remain authoritative for holdings. The CRA's records remain authoritative for contribution room. A consolidated view is a tool for noticing things, not a replacement for the records that count.

A reasonable approach

Aggregate first and reconcile second. Get everything into one view, then check each account against its most recent statement before trusting any derived number — returns, gains, allocation.

Pay attention to the seams. Transfers between institutions, securities held in more than one place, and anything acquired before you started keeping records are where errors concentrate.

Then check the things that only exist at the aggregate level: allocation, concentration, overlap, and blended cost. Those are the reason to aggregate at all. Everything else you could have read off a statement.