How to have "Investment Data" show value and/or shares

[codybear]

Hi Mark,

I don't know how to do this or if this is a wishlist, but I would like to be able to see the values and shares of an investment on a giving day. Right now you display the share balance and market value on the bottom right but that is today's value. I would like to click on a dated line from prices/transactions/etc. and see those values as of that date. Up to half my funds in the past have no support for transaction retrieval, so transactions have to be done manually. Sometimes I let a year or two go by and now I have to "balance" my account. But this is like balancing your checkbook without the benefit of a running total.

Please consider this or if already implemented, please guide me to how this is done. Obviously a graph is less than ideal.

Thanks.

[Mark]

Hi codybear,

You can get the value/shares as of any date you want in a variety of ways. Here are a couple:

1) In the Data Register set the "Data Type" to "Prices" in the upper-right drop-down. You will then see the shares/price/value for every date where you have a price recorded.

2) In several different reports you can see this, but the simplest is probably the "Portfolio Value" report. You can run this for any date you want. You will see the price, shares, and value of each investment for the date of the report.

[codybear]

Hi Mark,

Ok, make this a wish list then. Obviously a report is convoluted way to see the balance as one is trying to balance their account looking for missing transactions. Even flipping to the prices is convoluted as I have to scroll back two years of prices to get to my date. It would be nice to see the shares & value (as of the transaction date) immediately from the "All Transactions" dialog. Down by the bottom in the available space of the dialog box would be a good location for it.

[Mark]

Hi codybear,

Interesting idea, thanks. Maybe in addition to the current balance we could show the balance as of the date of whatever transaction is selected.

[codybear]

Hi Mark,

I've set a yearly reminder on January 1st to update my funds so I don't let this get out of hand. So in theory, I don't need this wish list because I will be able to see the total as I enter. The original problem was that I was not aware that when I retrieved transactions, I was not getting anything beyond 18 months (OFX limitation). So this created missing transactions and therefore, I could not use the running total to correspond with old statements. So you may want to give a warning when someone requests transactions older than 18 months.

Anyway, my wishlist will not be necessary for me going forward and if I was going to waste a wish, I would rather you have an option to turn off automatic entry of share price in transactions entry. Transactions involve a fixed dollar amount and a fixed share number. These should not be altered by the closing price. Everytime I enter a transaction, I have to clear the share price first so the my numbers are not altered because of the share price. This gets annoying and should never had been written that way in the first place. Obviously, an accurate dollar amount determines cost basis. An accurate share number determines correct ownership. I have never understood why you let the share price control the last empty field. And when I delete the share price first, then you recalculate the share price that will have fractions that are not really the accurate share price. That's not a problem for me because accurate share price is not relevant.

[Mark]

Hi codybear,

The transaction dialogs are designed to facilitate entering the value/shares exactly, and letting the rounding go into the price field. Please read these tips on entering transactions to avoid rounding errors.

[codybear]

Ok, so tabbing and pressing an "extra tab" resolves rounding errors when manually entering, but what about generic imports where I don't have that option? See "TRAN" in https://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/hel ... neric.html.

I have 401k funds that can not be retrieved through OFX, but I can get the transactions by downloading a CSV file. But generic imports buy, sell and reinvested do not support a value field so rounding or fraction of value can occur causing a slight numeric mismatch in cost basis. With after-tax 401k's, basis is relevant.

Furthermore, the downloaded CSV file has three columns: AMOUNT, NAV/PRICE, UNITS for all transactions. For buy, sell and reinvested, I would have NAV/PRICE be ANUM and UNITS be BNUM. While not a factor for my 401k's, the problem with your design where price is controlling, if I had a download with interlaced distributions (not reinvested), the AMOUNT column would be ANUM for those transactions resulting in the file having to be sorted into two separate files. But if VALUE controlled for buy, sell and reinvest, all could be imported with one file and no rounding problems would exist.

Its just a difference in philosophy of the design of your program. I had mentioned the price issue back in 2010 and apparently, at some point, you added the tab feature to correct manual entry. If you had relied on value and shares and then calculated your price off those then that would have resolved the manual entry problem and resolved the problem with imports. Because stocks are not based on closing price and mutual funds rarely have value/share exactly equal to closing price, I just don't believe price should have been given as much control as you originally designed.

I suspect that at this point, there is not much that can be done and it really isn't the end of the world. Just a slight annoyance brought on by my OCD.

[Mark]

Hi codybear,

Thanks for the feedback. I can see your point about using value in TRAN imports instead of a price. Something we can contemplate... For a work-around, you could create your own price field instead of using the one downloaded in the NAV/PRICE field. Since you have AMOUNT and UNITS, create another column where you divide these to generate your exact transaction price. Use that column for the import. This will eliminate any rounding issues in the VALUE of your transactions.

[codybear]

Already thought of that, but concluded it was more work than it was worth. There's a limit to my OCD and the IRS rounds to the nearest dollar.