Workplace plans mostly hold things no exchange lists: collective trusts and plan-only share classes like "Vanguard Target Retirement 2045 Trust II". They have a unit price on your statement and no public symbol to look it up by.
Add it by name. On the holdings step, Fund without ticker sits beside
Add ticker. These are the two ways a position gets in. It asks for the fund's name as
your statement prints it, its share count, and optionally a price per share and a
category. The app files it under a reserved MANUAL: symbol. A colon can't
appear in a real exchange ticker, so a generated id can never collide with one
that lists later.
Once a fund is registered, the form offers it in a Fund list. Picking it there is the clearest route, but retyping the name is safe too: a name that matches one already registered (ignoring case and spacing) resolves to that same fund and symbol rather than minting a second one, and the first spelling stays the display name.
The category is optional and worth setting. These funds are excluded from the Screener either way, but a category is what a target mix matches the fund against, so a plan's S&P 500 trust set to Large Blend counts toward that slice instead of sitting outside every one.
What that changes
- No price lookup is attempted. There is no feed to attempt one against. These funds stay out of Update Prices entirely. They never appear in its results, and never accumulate failures.
- The price is the one you typed, held until you change it. Enter the current unit price each time you update the account, the same way you update its share counts. The holdings step names any fund in this state so a months-old price can't pass for a current one.
- They're excluded from the Screener and from split detection, both of which need a market feed to mean anything.
TSP funds are the exception that already works
Federal TSP funds have no public tickers either, but they
do publish prices. A TSP account gets its own by-name picker on the holdings
step. It opens on arrival because its funds have no symbols to type, and the app
files them under TSP: and downloads their real price history from tsp.gov.
Other accounts aren't offered it, having nothing to pick from it. Don't add a TSP
fund by hand as a manual fund: you'd give up its price history for no reason.
The federal specialty sample uses periodic snapshots to demonstrate these funds. It does not calculate FERS benefits, model TSP-specific Roth conversions or pro-rata transaction rules, or tell you whether to stay in or roll out of TSP.
A manual fund's value is only as fresh as your last visit. If an account's total looks stale, its no-ticker funds are the first place to look.