Exempting Securities from Management Fees.

[aviator]

Hi Mark,

Please confirm that when a security is marked as "Exempt from Management Fees" that it is not included in the calculations for management fees.

My situation is this:
1) My broker does not charge management fees on cash holdings. Said differently, cash securities (usually in the form of an MMA) are exempt from fees.
2) Since fees are calculated at the sub level, not at the security level, I changed the properties of my cash investments to be exempt from management fees (Investment Properties/Other Tab/Exempt from Management Fees is checked. My assumption is that the value of these securities is not included the management fee calculation. Is my assumption correct?

Reason for my question is when I drill down on the Management Fee report, the Portfolio Value report is displayed. It shows cash as part of the Portfolio Value, which is true, but this cash should not be included when calculating management fees.

Thanks,

[Mark]

Hi aviator,

Yes, this is true as long as your management fee method is using a managed value to calculate fees. For example, any of the "% of Beg/Avg/End Value" methods.

This option does not apply to performance based fees (the "Performance" part of "% of Ending Value plus Performance").

[aviator]

Thanks, Mark.

I was ferreting out management fee discrepancies between what FM said we should have paid vs what was actually deducted. This led me to the online documentation for how FM calculates fees. According to the help text, FM does not consider weekends when calculating average daily balances. My brokerage firm does. My question is why does FM exclude weekends and can you see giving users a way to decide? Thanks.

[Mark]

Hi aviator,

Yes, the average calculation is done ignoring weekends. The decision to not include weekends was likely based on customer feedback, but I can't recall for sure.

Yes, we could make an option when defining this type of management fee method.

In the mean time, you can create a user-defined Custom report field with the equation:

AVERAGE(STARTDAYS(), ENDDAYS(), End_value, 1)

and set the report date range to the period under investigation. This will calculate the average value, including weekends. This equation can be slow to calculate, so you might want to run it on a small sub-portfolio first, to see how long it takes.

[aviator]

Thanks, Mark, especially for the formula and the heads-up of how long it takes run.

As I'm creating a custom report anyway, I'm trying to incorporate a couple of other fields. A couple of questions/comments, please.

1) Is there a field that shows projected income [between]? I see the annual projected income, was wondering if there's a field for between time periods.

2) Is there a field for expected fees [between]? Ideally, this is the data from the Management Fee report which, in my case, is pro-rated based on family member.

3) Suggestion for long-running reports. Issue a popup window warning a user that they're about to run a long report. Sometimes, making a simple change results in the report running again. Ordinarily not a problem with quick running reports, but with long-running reports sometimes even the cancel report command takes a long time to execute.

4) Some reports, notably standard canned reports that come with FM, present the settings dialog box before the report is run. The custom report I just created runs first, without a settings dialog box presented (therefore no dates or accounts can be changed prior to running). Can the settings box presented before every report runs, especially the long-running ones?

Thanks.

[Mark]

Hi aviator,

1 & 2) Sorry, no, neither of these are available today in a Custom report.

3) Okay, thanks for the idea.

4) You will see the Report Settings dialog come up first for all the reports, except when recalling a memorized report. Memorized reports are listed at the bottom, below the separator. When you memorize a report there are 2 options related to the starting/ending dates that you can set. The option to "float" the end date can be controlled as to how it floats under "Options / Report Preferences... / Other". There is no option currently to force the Report Settings dialog to open before re-creating a memorized report.