Every year at tax time I receive a report from my broker detailing the composition of the distributions for my ETFs. Since this information is not available until (after) year end but I want to record income at the time it is received, I record distributions as a dividend, income or capital gain based on the distribution mix from the prior year (basically, my best guess).
This means that I have to go back and correct the distribution mix from the prior year. For me, I'm mostly interested in the changes that affect my cost base - so I am often relabelling some distributions as return of capital. Unless I sold the ETF during the year, I don't worry about recording these ROCs exactly as the report indicates (i.e month by month). I just make sure that the totals match. So I change (for example) 4 full months and then adjust the 5th month so the totals are correct.
I don't think FM has any feature that supports such end-of-year accounting adjustments, but maybe I'm wrong (?).
As it stands, Fund Manager only allows me to edit one transaction at a time to make this change. It is a painful process.
It would be helpful if I could select more than one transaction and simultaneously change the distribution type on all of them.Better yet would be a feature to let me enter the total ROC and have FM distribute it "equally" across transactions that span a specified time period (since this seems to be how the ETFs manage those amounts). That is, adjust the original distribution downward and create new transactions in the (approximately) appropriate amounts. I realize this would be complicated and, if it is not practical, I hope you will consider my first suggestion.
Thanks,
Steven D.