Hi, I’m new to PP, now in the process of migrating my portfolio from Excel to PP. Before I keep going, I want to make sure that I input the records to PP in the right way so that I don’t end up redoing everything again. Here’s my context:
I live in UTC+7, so all the transactions of my clearing accounts are in UTC+7. Some of my investments must be made through domestic broker’s mutual funds for tax benefit. So these mutual fund security accounts and their reference deposit accounts are also in UTC+7.
The rest of my investment will go abroad, mainly to the US market. I have to exchange the currency from my clearing account (UTC+7) and deposit to my offshore deposit accounts (UTC-5/-4), then make a purchase in my offshore security account (UTC -5/-4).
Given a huge time offset between my home time zone & the US market, a single transaction may fall on different dates. So is there any recommendation to keep my recordings consistent ?
Should I keep using UTC+7 throughout my portfolio as this will also match my computer’s system time (but may break with API quotes as they are usually in the market’s local time) ?
Or should I use the local time of each transaction ? But as there seems to be nowhere to enter the time zone when adding a new transaction, how can PP know that the transaction made at 2025-08-04T22:00:00-04:00 should come after another transaction made at 2025-08-05T06:00:00+07:00 ?
Also, which time zone should be used for a transaction done across different time zones, as when I transfer my money from UTC+7 to UTC-5/-4 ?
By the way, thank you so much for creating PP. After trying many different Excel portfolio templates, I was finally lucky enough to find this piece of software !
Which time zone to use when recording transaction date/time ?
This is how PP handles date and time values.
The date and time of a transaction are stored without any timezone information. It is a “plain” iso date YYYY-MM-DD plus - if provided - the time.
The same is true for historic prices. They are stored only with the ISO date, i.e., YYYY-MM-DD. The thinking is that prices are “end of day” prices. The exact time depends on the exchange (say Frankfurt trades until 6 p.m. CEST). This generally works for all not continuously traded assets. Say I am in Australia and tracking European assets, the “end of day” price might be established shortly after midnight. But to look at past performance, one probably still sees it as end of day.
When downloading prices, it depends on the data source. Many data sources also “just” provide the ISO date. If they provide a timestamp, PP is assuming that it is UTC unless the source contains a timezone (Yahoo includes this in the response) or you configure differently for the JSON sources.
What does it mean for you?
Because there is no time zone, I propose to pick one (yours?) and then record all in that timezone. Then you could change the timezone later by recalculating the dates and times in the XML. Or, if PP in the future, adds timeline, it would also pick one to migrate to.
