Where to Keep Your Original Broker and Bank Documents — All in One File

If you track your investments with a tool like Parqet, Portfolio Performance, or any other performance tracker, you have probably noticed something: the tracker is brilliant at showing you numbers — returns, allocations, dividends over time — but it does almost nothing with the documents those numbers came from. The original buy note, the dividend credit, the annual tax statement, the account statement from your bank: those PDFs end up everywhere except in one organized place.

That is not a flaw in your tracker. It is simply not what a performance tracker is for. But it leaves a real gap, because the original documents are the ones that actually matter when it counts — at tax time, in a dispute, when you need to prove a cost basis, or years later when you are reconstructing what happened. This article is about closing that gap: keeping every original document in one searchable, encrypted file, with Arcaria.

Your Performance Tracker Isn’t a Document Archive

A performance tracker reads your transactions and turns them into a live picture of your portfolio. To do that, it stores data: a buy of 12 shares at a certain price on a certain date. What it does not keep is the source document — the PDF your broker issued to confirm that trade, with its order number, fees, tax breakdown, and the exact wording you may need later.

Most trackers were never designed to be a filing cabinet. They typically:

• Store extracted figures, not the original PDF.
• Have no full-text search across document contents.
• Offer no place to tag a document, annotate it, or correct a misread field.
• Leave you to find the original elsewhere when you actually need it.

So the documents scatter. Some sit in email. Some are in a Downloads folder with names like Abrechnung_2024_03_final(2).pdf. Some are still only in your broker’s portal — which often deletes statements after a year or two. When you finally need a specific dividend statement, the search starts.

The “One File” Problem

The usual fix is a folder system: a tree of directories by year, by bank, by type. It works for a while and then quietly rots. Folder names drift, documents land in the wrong place, and nothing inside the PDFs is searchable. Moving the whole thing to a new computer means dragging gigabytes of loose files and hoping the structure survives.

Arcaria takes a different approach: everything goes into one encrypted vault on your own computer. Not a folder full of files — a single, organized, searchable archive. That one-file design is the part most tools miss, and it is what makes the rest possible:

• One thing to back up. Your entire archive is a single encrypted file. Back it up or move it to another computer in one step.
• One thing to search. Full-text search runs across the whole vault at once.
• One thing to protect. There is one encrypted vault to secure, not a sprawling folder tree exposed in your file system.

What Arcaria Does With a Statement

When you import a PDF, Arcaria reads it for you and fills in the details that make it findable later: the date, amount, currency, bank, account or custody account, ISIN, and document type. Buy and sell notes, dividend credits, tax documents, and account statements are each sorted into place automatically.

Many statements from banks and brokers across Europe and beyond (with the deepest coverage in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) are recognized out of the box. When a statement isn’t detected automatically, you fill in the missing details in a few clicks — and because every field stays editable, you can correct or refine anything at any time. The original PDF always sits right beside the extracted details, so you can read the source and open it in your default app whenever you want.

Full-Text Search, Tags, and Notes — the Bonus

Storing the documents is the foundation. What makes the archive genuinely useful day to day is everything you can do once they are in:

• Full-text search across every document and every note, so you find a statement by what it says, not just its file name.
• Tags to group documents your own way — a tax year, a specific account, an asset class.
• Your own notes attached to any document, for the context a PDF doesn’t capture.
• Editable fields, so a misread amount or a missing ISIN is a quick fix, not a dead end.
• A name and color for each bank, so the whole archive reads at a glance.

This is the layer a performance tracker simply doesn’t offer, because it is solving a different problem.

Following a Position Across Banks by ISIN

Because every document carries its ISIN, Arcaria lets you follow a single security across banks and custody accounts. If you hold the same ETF at two brokers, the buy notes, dividend statements, and tax documents for that ISIN line up together — regardless of which institution issued them. That is something a per-broker portal can never do, and a tracker focused on aggregate performance usually won’t.

Local, Encrypted, and Offline

The reason all of this can live in one place is that it never leaves your machine. Arcaria has no account, no cloud, and no tracking. Your documents sit in a single encrypted vault, and backups are encrypted as well. It works fully offline, and it never connects to your bank or broker — you import the PDFs you already have.

This is the same local-first principle behind keeping your portfolio work on your own computer, described in analyzing your Parqet portfolio offline and in the companion tool for backing up your Parqet portfolio. Your performance tracker shows you where you stand; your document archive proves how you got there. Keeping both on your own machine means the complete record is always yours.

Availability

Arcaria is a desktop app for macOS (on the Mac App Store) and Windows (on the Microsoft Store). The app interface is available in English and German, with number and date formats matched to each language.

A final note: Arcaria is a document organizer and personal archive that helps you keep your financial paperwork in order. It does not provide investment, financial, tax, or legal advice, and nothing here is investment advice. It simply gives the original documents — the ones your tracker doesn’t keep — a single, searchable, encrypted home.