Sharesight can automatically process the PDF contract note attachments that are emailed to you by your broker after a trade has completed. Sharesight reads in the transaction details included in the email attachment and automatically records the trade into your portfolio. Once the trade has been successfully recorded into your portfolio, you will receive a confirmation email from Sharesight. Sharesight can currently process PDF contract notes from a number of brokers in NZ and Australia. Please see here for a list of supported brokers.
Broker email importing is enabled on a per portfolio basis. Sharesight generates a unique email address for each portfolio. You then need to instruct your broker to email a copy of your trade contract notes to this email address.
To enable broker email importing for a portfolio, click the ‘settings’ link (in the top right of the screen) and then click the ‘edit settings’ button below the relevant portfolio. Look for the section titled ‘Broker email import’ and click the ‘enable’ button. Once enabled, an email address for your portfolio will be displayed, which you can provide to your broker.
Each time a contract note is received from your broker, Sharesight will automatically create a trade in your portfolio. Trades created in this way will contain a comment to indicate that the trade was created in Sharesight via an email. Emails are typically processed in around 5 minutes. As soon as the trade has been processed you will receive a confirmation email from Sharesight containing a link to the newly created trade.
It is also possible to manually forward historic contract notes to Sharesight. In order to ensure correct processing, please ensure that the email has the name of the broker somewhere in the subject line of the email. In order to ensure a correct match, please type the broker name exactly as it appears in our list of supported brokers.
It is important to ensure that only valid contract notes in PDF format are forwarded for processing. Invoices, remittance advice, order confirmations etc are unable to be processed.
The mail import log can be viewed by clicking on the ‘View Contract Notes’ button on the settings page for your portfolio (click ‘settings’ then ‘edit settings’ below the relevant portfolio). This will display a list of all emails sent to your portfolio email address. The status column displays the current status of the transaction (eg Processed or Failed)
You can click on each row in the email import log to view details of the email along with details and a link to the trade that has been created in Sharesight.
Occasionally a trade may not be able to be imported. If a trade is unable to be imported, you will receive an email notifying you of this along with a brief explanation of the problem. The email will also show the ‘Failed’ status in the email import log.
Below is a list of the most common types of errors and how to handle them:
Validation error
Validation errors are the most common reason for a trade import to fail. Validation errors mean that the email has been processed correctly, but importing the trade would result in an error in your portfolio. For example a sell trade cannot be imported if you do not have any pervious buy trades recorded as this would result in a negative quantity of shares being held.
If you receive a validation error you can fix the problem in your portfolio and then reprocess the transaction by re-forwarding the broker contract note to your portfolio email address (see: Forwarding historic broker contract notes to Sharesight)
Unknown Broker error
Sharesight cannot determine which broker the email is from. Please ensure that the broker is on the list of supported brokers. Sharesight usually uses the ‘from’ address of the broker to determine which broker has sent the email, however if you are manually forwarding broker contract notes to Sharesight for processing, please ensure that the email subject line contains the name of the broker.
If your broker is not on the list, ask us to support your broker by submitting an ‘idea’ to the community forum. If someone else has already suggested that we add your broker, please click the +1 button to add you vote. This will allow us to prioritise support for additional brokers.
Processing error
Usually this is because the email does not contain a valid trade contract note. Sometimes brokers send out other emails (eg newsletters) to their email database, or a spam email has been received. These errors can usually be ignored. Spam emails are usually not a problem provided that your unique portfolio email address is kept private, however if you do have a problem with spam email, please contact us.
If you believe that a valid contract note resulted in a processing error, please contact us.