by aviator » Tue May 11, 2010 2:33 pm
Mark, after using FM heavily for the past few weeks, I'm impressed. Below are a couple of suggestions that would make life easier and more efficient by reducing keystrokes:
1. Hidden Investments. Allow users to select a color to highlight hidden investments in the Portfolio Editor. Each row of hidden investment would be displayed in, say, blue which would allow immediate identification of what's hidden.
2. Greater customization of the Portfolio Editor toolbar. Would love to see an option for a Specific Lots button, where I could highlight an investment and click on the SL button to immediately open the Specify Lots dialog. Having to right click the investment, then hover over Investment Data and then click on Specify Lots... is time consuming.
3. My most desired improvement: Totals on the bottom of the right side of Portfolio Editor. I don't like having to click on the top of the tree, refocus my eyes on the account I want totals for, then click on that account to go back to investments.
4. A way to void a transaction instead of just deleting or editing. For example: My brokerage house sometimes makes mistakes (far too often for my liking, but that's another topic), and the only way they can correct the mistake is to issue a reversal transaction. Problem is their software does not handle reversals well. I end up with 2 transactions that are virtually identical except for the memo field which indicates one transaction is a reversal. It's easy enough to identify and delete the offending transactions, but the real problem occurs when I next import QFX transactions. Because the two transactions were deleted, the import process brings them back again. In Quicken, users have the ability to void a transaction which, when done, does not get repopulated on subsequent QFX imports. (BTW, I'm sure this isn't a glitch in FM... I had a similar problem with how Quicken processed reversals. My belief is that the problem lies with my brokers software.)
5. My brokerage house uses the Minimum Gain method of redemption for all investments. Sure would be nice if there was a global setting in FM that would allow all redemptions to be handled the same way, every time. In other words, assume that *all* sell transactions are Minimum Gain, and allow the user to override should they need to.
Items 6 and 7 added on 6/14/2010.
6. Transaction Retrieve. Would be nice if accounts with retrieved transactions were differentiated from those without. In Quicken, accounts containing retrieved transactions have a small red flag near each account number, indicating the presence of transactions needing review. Accounts without transactions have no flag. (I realize that the Portfolio Editor can be customized to include the last transaction date. However, this method still requires looking at each account instead of quickly being alerted though a flag or color.)
7. Securities that fail to download prices. At the end of the price retrieve/price history retrieve process, it would be nice to see some sort of indication of how many security prices were retrieved and, most importantly, how many failed. Would be even better if there was a list of the failed securities. Right now, I believe the only way to see which securities failed the price retrieve is to customize the Portfolio Editor with the Last Price column. Would be much nicer to have an alert instead of having to read though an entire column of dates. (Would also save real estate on the Portfolio Editor screen for more meaningful columns.)
Last edited by
aviator on Mon Jun 14, 2010 2:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.