Platforms are not trading accounts

The Portfolio keeps its own list, and it is not the list of accounts you connected in the Tracker. It keeps PLATFORMS: the places money moves through. A prop firm you buy evaluations from, a broker that charges you for data, the payment rail a payout arrives in, the bank you move it to afterwards.

A trading account is a thing a broker syncs — it holds a balance, it has fills behind it, and it can break. A platform is a relationship you assert. Nothing connects, nothing syncs, and there is no credential anywhere on it. You are declaring that Apex costs you money and Topstep pays you, which is a statement no broker connection can make on your behalf.

Why they had to be separate

Consider what a prop trader actually wants to know: what has this firm cost me, and what has it paid me back. A balance roster cannot answer either. It knows what an account holds; it does not know that you paid for three evaluations, failed two, reset one, and have a $200-a-month data subscription running behind all of it. Those movements have no fill and no position — they never appear in a P&L curve, and for a lot of traders they are the whole difference between a good year and a flat one.

They also do not line up one-to-one. One firm can give you four accounts, and money you spend at that firm belongs to the firm rather than to any one of them. A trader with three prop firms and no linked broker has a full Portfolio and an empty account roster, which is exactly the case the old design got wrong.

The consequence to know about

The account picker in the navbar does not narrow anything in the Portfolio. Untick every account and the figures do not move. That is correct rather than broken: the picker is a list of trading accounts, and a platform has none to be picked — every money figure on these five pages is computed over platform-owned rows and nothing else.

The date selector beside it does apply, but only on three of the five pages — Dashboard, Transactions and Budget. Accounts takes no window at all, because its tiles are sums across the whole roster, and the Calendar is driven by its own month cursor instead.

Registering one

1. 1Open the accounts button in the navbar while you are in Portfolio — it opens a drawer with two tabs — Portfolio Accounts and Add Account. In the Tracker the same button says Link Account, and the wording difference is the whole point: here you are declaring a relationship, not authorising one.
2. 2Pick it from the catalogue — grouped as prop firms, brokers and platforms, and payment and banking. Choosing a tile pre-fills the form; you can also just type a name for something the catalogue does not carry.
3. 3Give it a type — Prop firm, Broker, Payment, Bank or Other. The type is a label rather than a capability — the Portfolio treats all five identically, as places money goes in and out of — so it decides how the row is grouped and counted, not what it can do.

Names are matched loosely enough to stop the obvious mistake: “Cash App”, “cash app” and “Cash-App” are one platform, not three. The name is lowercased and its punctuation collapsed before the check, so the second one is refused rather than quietly becoming a row you cannot tell from the first.

Included, and what excluding one does

Every platform has an Included checkbox, and it does less than the word suggests. Unticking one takes it out of the Dashboard’s list of accounts and the flow split beneath the hero, out of the Prop and Personal chips, and out of the Included count in the drawer. It does not change the balance itself, and it does not change the three headline tiles, the cash-flow chart, the Transaction Breakdown, either calendar or the Budget — those count a movement because it is filed against a platform, not because that platform is ticked.

Nothing is deleted either way. Every transaction you logged against it stays, the row stays in the roster, and the checkbox stays in the drawer, which is the only place it can be reached.

Removing one archives it instead. It leaves the roster and its Included box is cleared with it, but the money you already logged against it still counts toward your balance — archiving a relationship does not unspend what it cost you.

The six figures in the drawer

• Total platforms — how many you have registered. No cap is enforced today, so it shows a plain count rather than a number out of a limit.
• Prop firms · Brokers · Payment — the roster split by type.
• Included — how many of them are ticked — the one figure the checkbox column produces and nothing else on the panel states.
• Tracked — the lifetime net across every platform you have logged against, archived and unticked ones included. It is read from the same place the Dashboard’s balance is, so the drawer and the page behind it cannot disagree.

One thing to keep tidy: if your included platforms end up in more than one currency, the Dashboard refuses to sum them rather than converting behind your back. It says so instead of showing a number that means nothing.