Security Data Table

[Ron AKA]

As a new user of Fund Manager I have found one particular aspect of the database structure a bit different than what I would expect I would have done starting with a clean sheet of paper. In a former life I did some database development with an application called Clarion Professional Developer. Perhaps it is must my impression based on the user interface, but it seems to me that "pure" and normally somewhat permanent Security data attributes get "baked" into the Investment data table. The issue is that over all the portfolios and sub portfolios you can end up with many instances of different Investments that use exactly the same Security. Then when you want to make a change to a Security, you have to dig into all the Investments to make the change. Yes, I have noticed that some attributes can be applied to all Investments using this Security, but that feature is not universal and seems like a work around the root cause issue. My suggestion is that this application needs the addition of a clean Security table, and associated maintenance screen, independent from Investments. This would allow you to only enter one Security once, and after that just link it to Investments via a lookup table, as you create the Investment. It would also allow setting a current price server and associated symbol for each security, and a potentially different historical price server and associated symbol which would also be different. Like the application is now, the default choice could still be the universal default server, or the specific one you enter manually.

All of the other semi permanent data fields associated with a Security should be included in this data table as well. These would be the Asset Type, Investment Goal, etc... Then if down the road one decides that a certain investment has changed, there is a one stop place to change all the Investments that use this Security. Or if a price server ceases to work, you can easily make the change.

I appreciate this may be a fairly basic change in the data table structure, but I think it potentially corrects a long standing problem with Securities, Pricing, and Pricing Servers. In my search to find solutions to the issues I was having I found this old post from 2005, so it seems to have some history.

https://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/q2q ... /7641.html

Ron

[Mark]

Hi Ron,

Thanks for the feedback. I agree your approach would be best if we were starting from scratch. Currently, each investment is saved to its own file (*.dat). All the properties/prices/transactions are stored in this *.dat file. It would be better for many cases to have one file (or table) per security that stored common information, like prices/properties. This change has been something we've had on our list to fix for a long time, but it is a very big change at this point. We have attempted to make it somewhat transparent to the user in some cases, like where you have the option to change all the investments at once. In the Advisor version we have added a "Edit / Symbol List..." command. For Advisors they may have hundreds of clients in the same investment, so it is more of an issue in that case. The Symbol List... command allows editing of any investment property by symbol. Usually in the Personal use case it isn't as big of an issue if you have to edit on a per-investment basis.