Prop firm account tracker: track every fee, reset and payout

Firms, resets and rebills break a spreadsheet. What to record for each prop account, a sample ledger, and a simple weekly way to track prop firm payouts.

2026-10-31

If you've bought more than a handful of prop firm evaluations, you probably can't say right now how much you've spent on them. Not roughly. Exactly. Between evaluations, resets, monthly rebills, activation fees and the occasional sale, the money leaves in small pieces, to different firms, on different days, and nobody adds it up for you.

The fix is a simple prop firm account tracker: one ledger of every dollar in and out, plus one line per account that says what it cost, what it paid, how long it lasted and how it ended. Below is exactly what to record, a sample ledger you can copy, a ten-minute weekly routine, and how to make it answer the one question that matters: has this money come back?

Why a normal spreadsheet breaks down

Most traders start with a sheet: firm, account size, price. It works for three accounts. By account fifteen it has stopped telling the truth, and that's usually not the trader's fault. Prop money has a shape that simple spreadsheets handle badly.

• Many firms, many receipts. Each firm bills differently, from different email addresses, sometimes in different currencies. Miss one email and you've missed a cost.
• Resets belong to an account, not a date. A reset is part of what that account cost. If it sits on its own row with no link back, the account looks cheaper than it was.
• Monthly rebills keep running. An evaluation you stopped trading still bills next month unless you cancel it. Rebills are the cost traders forget most often.
• Attempts blur together. "The 50K at Firm A" might be your fourth 50K at Firm A. Without an account number, attempts merge and you lose count of how many you bought.
• Payouts land somewhere else. They arrive in your bank or a payment app weeks later, so they rarely end up on the same sheet as the costs.
• Sales hide the real price. A 70% off coupon makes one account cheap, and makes it easy to buy three more you didn't plan for.

If a reset or a rebill isn't tied to the account it paid for, your tracker is quietly lying to you.

What to record for every prop account

Give every account its own line, even the ones that lasted a single day. Here is the minimum, and why each field earns its place.

The last two fields are the ones most trackers skip, and they're the most valuable. Money tells you what happened. How it ended and the lesson tell you why, and why is the only part you can change. If you want help writing lessons that are actually useful later, read lessons from blown accounts.

A sample prop firm ledger

A ledger is just a list of every money event, one row each, tied to an account. Here's an example trader's first two months with one account at each of two firms (firm names and prices are hypothetical):

Now roll it up into one line per account:

Two months, two accounts, and already three lessons. The Firm A account cost $327, not the $99 sticker price: more than three times as much. The Firm B account billed again a week after it was blown, because nobody canceled the subscription. And overall this trader is up $103 in real money ($500 in, $397 out), which feels very different from "I got a $500 payout".

The price of an account is what it had cost by the day it ended, not the number on the checkout page.

The simple system: ten minutes a week

You don't need anything fancy. You need the same small routine every week, before the receipts pile up.

• Search your email for every firm you use, plus words like "receipt", "invoice" and "renewal". Log anything new.
• Log each charge against an account, never on its own. A reset goes under the account it reset.
• Check your subscriptions. For every evaluation you're no longer trading, cancel the rebill today and note the date.
• Close out ended accounts. Add the end date, how it ended and one line of lesson while you still remember the day.
• Log payouts the day they're approved, with the gross amount and any fee the firm kept.
• Read the totals: total spent, total paid back and the net. Write the net somewhere you'll see it.

The weekly rhythm matters more than the tool. A week-old receipt is easy to find. A year-old one, in April, is not.

What the numbers tell you once you have them

A complete tracker answers questions that are impossible to answer from memory. Here's what a sample trader in our demo sees after 28 months and 37 prop accounts:

• Total paid to firms: $7,019. Evaluations $5,125, resets $1,457 (15 resets) and activation fees $437.
• Total payouts: $1,850 from 3 payouts, the first one in month 25.
• Net from prop firms: −$5,169. About 26% of what went to the firms has come back.
• Cost per funded account: $1,404 in firm fees. Five evaluations passed out of 29 that finished, a 17% pass rate.
• Resets were 21% of all firm spending. Not a rounding error: a habit worth looking at.

None of those numbers was visible from the inside. Each purchase felt small. Added up, they tell a clear story, and in this case a hopeful one too: the same trader's last 12 months came out slightly ahead in real money (+$28), as accounts started lasting longer. You can only see a turn like that if you've been keeping score the whole time.

The insight most traders miss: cost per funded account is the number to watch, not the price of one evaluation. If you pay $99 per evaluation and pass one in eight, a funded account costs you about $800 before a single reset. Cost per funded account shows how to work out yours.

How My Trading Journey does it for you

If you'd rather not maintain the sheet yourself, the Am I profitable? part of My Trading Journey in Market Matrix is built around exactly this ledger. You log each fee in a few seconds (firms don't send their fees anywhere automatically, so you add them), payouts are recorded on your funded accounts, and everything else is added up for you.

• The ledger: every entry in one list, with search, filters, edit and delete, and a CSV export for your accountant.
• Every prop account: one row per account with cost, payouts, net, days lasted, outcome and how it ended. It's sortable, with totals by firm and cost per account.
• The money statement: one row per month, quarter or year with a running total, so you can see when the money turned.
• Missing-cost warnings: if an account has a payout but no cost logged, you get a warning, because a payout with no cost makes you look more profitable than you are.
• Click any number to see the entries behind it.

Every part has a Prop firms / Personal / All together switch and a period selector, so you can look at all time, the last 3 or 12 months, or a single year. Simulated evaluation and funded P&L is never counted as money: only payouts in and fees out.

See your prop accounts in My Trading Journey →

Common tracking mistakes

• Counting funded account P&L as income. On most prop accounts that balance is simulated. It isn't yours until it's paid out. See is a funded account real money?
• Logging the sticker price. Log what you actually paid after discounts, plus every reset and rebill.
• Deleting blown accounts. They're the most useful rows you have. Keep every one.
• Mixing deposits with profit. Money you move into a personal trading account is still your own money, not a gain.
• Only tracking the good months. Gaps make the totals look better and teach you nothing.

Start with what you can find today

You don't need a perfect history to begin. Open your email, search each firm's name, and log what you find for the last three months. That alone usually shows you something you didn't expect. Then keep it going weekly.

If a receipt is gone, estimate it and mark it as an estimate. A close number written down today is worth more than a perfect number you never find. Your firm's account dashboard often lists past purchases too, so check there before you guess.

For the bigger picture on whether all of this spending pays off, read are prop firms worth it? and the real cost of prop trading. The core Market Matrix journal is free, and every new member gets 14 days of everything, including My Trading Journey, with no credit card.

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This article is for education only and isn't financial advice. Trading futures involves substantial risk of loss.