How to track an ISA and pension together with taxable in one view

Quick question, no peeking. What is your actual net worth right now, across the ISA, the pension or SIPP, and the taxable account you trade from? Not one of them. All of them, added up, this minute. If your brain returned a shrug, relax, that is not a you problem. You have been handed three accounts that each live in their own sealed wing of the house, each with its own rules and its own smug little dashboard that pretends the other two do not exist. The whole point of tracking an ISA and pension together is to stop accepting that as normal. Your money does not respect the walls. Neither should your view of it.

Why tax wrappers fragment your view

A wrapper is just a set of rules wrapped around money you already own. An ISA shelters it one way, a pension or SIPP shelters it another, a taxable account does not shelter it at all and the taxman takes a keen interest. Useful rules, all of them. The problem is what those walls do to your ability to SEE.

Every wrapper reports in its own frame. The ISA platform shows you the ISA and nothing else, because the ISA is the entire universe as far as it is concerned. The pension provider does the same trick in its own wing. The taxable broker shows you gains and losses the others never have to mention. Three confident screens, three partial truths, and not one of them is lying exactly. They are each just profoundly parochial, like asking three people who have only ever seen one room each to describe the house.

So the thing you most want to know, where you actually stand, is the one number nobody will tell you. It exists only as a wobbly estimate you assemble by logging into three places and doing sums in your head. We can do better than that.

What the split view quietly costs you

A scattered book hides exactly the stuff that matters, and it hides it for free, so you never get a bill that says “you misjudged this.”

Take what you own. Hold the same fund in your ISA and your taxable account and each screen shows you a modest, comfortable slice. Across the whole book you are twice as exposed as either screen admits, and you tend to find this out on the precise morning the thing gaps down. Allocation goes the same way. You cannot honestly say how much of your net worth sits in equities, or in one region, or in cash, when the bottom of that fraction is split across three wrappers and the top is being double counted.

Cost basis is worse than it looks. Your realised P&L and your tax lots only behave when every purchase of a security sits in one ledger that can order them. Split the same holding across a wrapper and a taxable account and no single platform can work out your real position, for the dull reason that none of them holds all the lots. Blame the wrappers if you like, but the real culprit is having no place that sees across them.

Seeing an ISA, a SIPP and taxable in one view

The fix is not, despite what your instincts are shouting, a fourth login. It is one book, entered a single time, that holds every wrapper at once.

You model each account as the thing it really is. An account for the ISA, an account for the pension or SIPP, an account for each taxable broker, plus the exchange and the cash if that is where some of your money lives. You enter the holdings and transactions into each, once. Most people own a few dozen positions built up slowly over years, not four hundred, so this is one sitting with a cup of tea, not a lost weekend. From then on the ledger is the system of record and you only append as you trade.

Because you typed it, you can hold each account up against its own statement and know it reconciles, which is the one thing a scraped feed can never hand you. We have made the case for manual entry being a feature, not a limitation, and the whole-book view across wrappers is where that choice quietly pays off. From that one pile of facts, Strata works out what none of your providers will. Your net worth across every wrapper and asset class. Your true size in each security once the duplicates are rolled together, so the allocation you read is the one you actually hold. FIFO tax lots and realised P&L computed over everything at once. The map, drawn whole, from a ledger you control.

Keeping each wrapper its own thing

Here is the part that separates this from just bolting all your money into one bucket. A whole-book view that smears the ISA, the pension and the taxable account into a single undifferentiated blob would be useless, because the walls between wrappers are real and they matter. The point is to see the total AND keep each wrapper distinct.

So every account stays tagged as what it is. You get the consolidated net worth, and you can also look at the ISA on its own, the pension on its own, the taxable book on its own, without re-entering a thing. Allocation and basis respect the boundaries that count, like which holdings are sealed inside a tax-advantaged wrapper and which sit out in the open. It is the same trick as tracking a book across multiple brokerage accounts, pushed one layer deeper, because wrappers scatter your holdings under different rules as well as scattering the holdings themselves. One reconciled book carries the grand total and every wing of the house labelled.

The rules differ, so check your own

Now the bit where I stop swaggering and put my hands up. This is general education, not tax advice, and I am not inventing numbers for you. Wrapper rules, contribution limits, allowances and what happens when you take money out all differ by where you live, and they change. An ISA and a SIPP are the obvious leading example because they are common, but the same shape of problem shows up under whatever wrappers your own jurisdiction offers.

Strata holds the picture honestly and keeps each wrapper distinct so you can reason about it. It will not tell you your allowance or file anything on your behalf. For the rules that apply to you, check your provider, the relevant tax authority, or a professional paid to know. What Strata hands you is the reconciled book to bring to that conversation, which beats three half-remembered logins.

That is the whole pitch. Your real net worth lives across wrappers with different rules, and no single platform was ever built to show it to you. The thing worth having is the reconciled book, and you build that yourself. If you would rather see the total and every wrapper clearly instead of guessing, you can build your portfolio and stop logging into three places to do mental arithmetic about your own money.