Requested new features

[asgard60]

Hi!

I am definately interested in purchasing FM. However, there are a couple capabilities I need that are not included. I am curious as to whether these will be included in version 9. (also is the version 9 to be released in May still?) What is the upgrade policy if I purchase ver 8.8, can i upgrade to version 9 without any additional cost?

Anyway back to my requests:

Please include the following ways to classify stocks/mutual funds (matching morning stars x-ray)

1) Asset Class (cash, us stocks, foreign stocks, bonds, other, not classified)
2) Portfolio composition (large value, large blend, large growth, small blend, small value, small growth, med blend, med value, med growth)
3) Stock Sector
a. Information
1. software
2. hardware
3. media
4. telecommunications
b. Service
1. Healthcare
2. Consumer
c. Manufacturing
1. consumer goods
2. industrial materials
3. energy
4. utilities

4) Stock Type
a. high yield
b. distressed
c. hard assets
d. cyclical
e. slow growth
f. classic growth
g. aggressive growth
h. speculative growth
i. not classified

I would also like to able to define by region or country.

In addition, it would be freaking awesome if this could be automated, as opposed to hand entering this data.

Can you please comment about the inclusions of the above requests?

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Best Regards,

Jeanette

[Mark]

Hi Jeanette,

The upgrade policy is if you purchase 8.x within 60 days of 9.x being released, you get a free upgrade. The 9.0 release date is not set firmly, but it will be around May or June.

You can already report on these items. When creating a report you can have it list or sub-total by:

Investment
Symbol (combines investments with a common symbol)
Investment Type (Stock, Fund, Bond, Option, etc)
Asset Type
Investment Goal

The Asset Type and Investment Goal categories are defined by you. You can set them up to categorize anything you want. Define the labels under "Options / Category Labels". You then assign each of your investments into percentages of these categories.

This information is not automatically available, it is manually entered or imported from a CSV file. It would be nice to be able to retrieve this data.

[4Profits]

Mark,
As you know I have been using Fund Manager at least since version 3 and maybe longer, I can't remember anymore. I have seen tremendous growth and improvements in the product and you have a history of listening to your customers. I think these forms show some good enhancements that in some cases can be added easily and others Well they may be hard. SO!

I will second some of the requests made by Jeanette. While it is true you do have a Goal Field and an Asset Type field the number of entries for both of these fields that you can enter is limited. I have gone so far as to try to edit the registry to increase the number with no success. When you finally allowed us to display the the properties on the screen this helped a lot, But I too would like to have a field that shows the country of stock, What stock exchange it was purchased on, Stock sectors and stock types. For all of these fields. I would like to have a much larger number of fields to define than 25. You don't even have to give the fields a specific name. Give us 5 user defined fields that have say 100 possible selections. and allow us to put them on the screen.

[Mark]

Hello 4Profits,

Thanks for the feedback/ideas, it does help to hear this.

[data8504]

So I don't want to trash the top level with another "feature request" thread, so here's my list:

(FM's great, by the way!)

- Printing is a very kludgey. I am currently using a 1440x900 resolution display, and I have to keep different reports open for *viewing* and *printing* since the ones that go on the screen are waaay too wide to print, and the ones for printing are way too small for my bad eyes. A "scale vertically to fit" feature would be AMAZINGLY helpful. Along those lines, common Windows program etiquette says that clicking "File > Print" or pressing Ctrl+P should NOT print immediately, instead go to the printer selection/etc. panel. The whole printer selection from page setup is very odd. And oldskool.

- Although the show/hide sold investments file operation is handy, it would be much nicer (and I'm sure very easy to implement) to have this feature included on the individual report settings panel. For instance, if I want to generate reports for my YTD and QTD performance (and don't want extraneous data), I have to go do the same file operation twice.

Here's where I get needy...
- I do a lot of batch work. It would be amazing if certain common features "Print report type X for date Y through Z on printer P." or the same with graphs. Also, and I know there is a automatic price/transaction retrieval option, but I don't always have FM running so placing "fm.exe --priceretrieve:Yahoo" in the task scheduler for 6:30 PM would be so awesome.

- The custom report type is awesome, but unfortunately the column data doesn't seem to be associated with the report itself. Instead, it seems that the report type is simply "Custom" and the column set is associated with this schema. This proves annoying when I want two different custom reports. I know this wouldn't be easy to implement, but I'm sure I'm not the only one to want it.

- The chart types available are very extensive, but they could be so much better if they leveraged all the potential data fields of the custom report type. For example, there is no way for me to overlay Value and Tax Unrlz Gain ID (I know I can get close with the Cost/Value chart, but it's not quite there).

Now for some smaller suggestions:
- Unfortunately, the reconcile feature doesn't like reconciling hierarchies of subportfolios for me. Am I doing something wrong? My suggestion for this is simply to give a "Done and Reconcile Another" button at the end of the wizard.

- I'm sure that I, like most, people have to pop back and forth between "Yahoo" and "Yahoo (Historical)" for price retrieval on days where I am either too busy or forget to update price data. Is there some way to separate "Historical" and "Daily" price retrieval so that this can be done in fewer clicks? It is very cumbersome.

- So I'm not sure if I'm the only one who'd like this, but a Report export-to-CSV option would be great. Sometimes I have to pull data into Excel or Word. This'd also be great for the scripting/command line idea above.

I think that's all I have for now. I can't stress enough how wonderful FM is and how much I use it. Please keep up the great work... there are just things I'd really like to see. Any insight into if anything like these'll make it into 9.0?

Thanks, Mark.

-Matt

[Mark]

So I don't want to trash the top level with another "feature request" thread, so here's my list:

Please feel free to make as many topics as you want.

- Printing is a very kludgey. I am currently using a 1440x900 resolution display, and I have to keep different reports open for *viewing* and *printing* since the ones that go on the screen are waaay too wide to print, and the ones for printing are way too small for my bad eyes. A "scale vertically to fit" feature would be AMAZINGLY helpful. Along those lines, common Windows program etiquette says that clicking "File > Print" or pressing Ctrl+P should NOT print immediately, instead go to the printer selection/etc. panel. The whole printer selection from page setup is very odd. And oldskool.

You're right, the current printing is rather 'old school'. It has been significantly improved for 9.0. It still doesn't have a 'scale to fit' option though, that would be a good idea. Also, you might consider using 'skins' to quickly switch between your display and printing preferences.

- Although the show/hide sold investments file operation is handy, it would be much nicer (and I'm sure very easy to implement) to have this feature included on the individual report settings panel. For instance, if I want to generate reports for my YTD and QTD performance (and don't want extraneous data), I have to go do the same file operation twice.

Good point, I agree this would be useful. I do hope to get this into 9.0.

- I do a lot of batch work. It would be amazing if certain common features "Print report type X for date Y through Z on printer P." or the same with graphs. Also, and I know there is a automatic price/transaction retrieval option, but I don't always have FM running so placing "fm.exe --priceretrieve:Yahoo" in the task scheduler for 6:30 PM would be so awesome.

Okay. BTW, there is already a command line argument for retrieving prices automatically. See Command Line Arguments.

- The custom report type is awesome, but unfortunately the column data doesn't seem to be associated with the report itself. Instead, it seems that the report type is simply "Custom" and the column set is associated with this schema. This proves annoying when I want two different custom reports. I know this wouldn't be easy to implement, but I'm sure I'm not the only one to want it.

The column preferences are associated with each report. You can have as many different custom reports, each with their own column preferences as you want. What specific problem are you running into?

- The chart types available are very extensive, but they could be so much better if they leveraged all the potential data fields of the custom report type. For example, there is no way for me to overlay Value and Tax Unrlz Gain ID (I know I can get close with the Cost/Value chart, but it's not quite there).

Now for some smaller suggestions:
- Unfortunately, the reconcile feature doesn't like reconciling hierarchies of subportfolios for me. Am I doing something wrong? My suggestion for this is simply to give a "Done and Reconcile Another" button at the end of the wizard.

- I'm sure that I, like most, people have to pop back and forth between "Yahoo" and "Yahoo (Historical)" for price retrieval on days where I am either too busy or forget to update price data. Is there some way to separate "Historical" and "Daily" price retrieval so that this can be done in fewer clicks? It is very cumbersome.

Good ideas, thanks.

- So I'm not sure if I'm the only one who'd like this, but a Report export-to-CSV option would be great. Sometimes I have to pull data into Excel or Word. This'd also be great for the scripting/command line idea above.

I agree it would be good to have a way to export directly to CSV. You can however get there with a couple of extra steps. See: Exporting Reports to Excel.