Updated September 2026
Selling covered calls or cash-secured puts as a repeated income strategy quickly outgrows checking each broker's app one at a time — especially once positions are spread across more than one account. Here's a practical, step-by-step approach to tracking it properly, whether you use a spreadsheet, this tool, or your own system.
Treat each brokerage account separately, even at the same broker — a Fidelity taxable account and a Fidelity Roth IRA are two different pools of cash and shares, and mixing them in tracking hides real shortfalls. A simple naming convention (Broker-AccountType, e.g. "Fidelity-Roth", "IBKR-Margin") keeps this unambiguous as the list grows.
For each cash-secured put or covered call: type (put or call), account tag, ticker, strike, contracts, expiration date, and premium collected. An optional entry date unlocks annualized yield — without it, you can still track everything else, just without that one comparison figure.
Puts need cash (strike × 100 × contracts); calls need shares of the specific ticker (100 × contracts). These aren't interchangeable, and combining them into one "exposure" number hides which specific requirement — cash or a particular stock's shares — is actually short. Keep cash-per-account and shares-per-ticker-per-account as separate running totals.
The moment you're deciding whether to sell another put or call, that's when the cross-account total matters most — not at month-end review. A dashboard (or a spreadsheet you actually keep open) that shows current cash usage against available cash, updated live as you add a position, lets you catch an over-commitment before the trade is placed rather than after.
A past-expiration put or call no longer ties up cash or shares — but if it's still sitting in your active list, it can overstate your current exposure and understate what's actually available. Whatever system you use, expired positions need a clear "no longer counts" state, separate from deleting the record entirely (you'll usually still want it for your own history).
No tracking tool — including this one — can see your broker's assignment notice for you. The moment you're assigned, update cash (spent, for a put) or shares (called away, for a call) manually, so the next coverage check reflects reality rather than a stale assumption.
All six steps above work in a spreadsheet — it's simply more manual: DTE needs a formula or a manual recount, live P/L needs a price lookup you maintain yourself, and cross-account totals need a summary tab kept in sync by hand. An automated tracker (like this one) does steps 3 through 5 automatically once positions are logged, and adds live option pricing for real P/L rather than an intrinsic-value guess. See the full comparison on the spreadsheet alternative page.
Choosing which stock and strike to sell a covered call or put against is a separate decision from tracking what you've already sold — this tool (and this guide) focuses on the tracking side once a position exists, not on screening for new trade ideas.
Do I need a different tool for each broker? No — the point of tracking by account tag rather than by broker's native app is combining everything in one place regardless of how many brokers you use.
How often should I update my tracking? Whenever you open, close, or are assigned on a position — live prices and DTE update automatically in this tool, but your actual trade activity has to be entered as it happens.