It's probably not a good idea to change the starting balances. If you track investments at FMV, you want the starting balances to show the Jan 1 FMV. Otherwise you will have a huge Unrealized Gain in the current year that actually happened in prior years.

But if you still want to change it, here's some information:

The balance in accounts is the starting balance + all the transactions in the account. So if you change the starting balance, Navigator adds the transaction amounts and comes up with a new balance.

The FMV is normally calculated using PriceLink, StockWeb, or manual entry using Investments | Enter Prices to Update Securities. Any of those processes creates the appropriate transaction in the Unrealized Gain & Loss (UGL) account, which in turn changes the balance in the investment account.

If you change the starting balance, you need to change the UGL account to match. You could make a manual entry, but it is easier to update prices. Updating prices will make whatever adjustment is needed to the UGL account so that the investment account balance shows the correct FMV.

This is easy if you only need the current FMV. Just update prices for today or at the end of the month. It is much more complicated if you want to correct the FMV for each past month. The problem is that if you have sold some shares in an account Navigator will calculate the wrong FMV because it will be using the wrong number of shares.

- David
FNI Technical Support
Case #38-10853