It is often desirable to see how much money flowed into or out of your portfolio. Portfolio external cash flow can be reported using the fields:
Contributions
Withdrawals
Withdrawn Distributions
These fields are available in the Portfolio Performance report, the Executive Summary report, and the Custom report. The Investment Transaction report can also be filtered to only show transactions that are "portfolio external". The external cash flow into a portfolio is Contributions - Withdrawals - Withdrawn Distributions.
Contributions:
Contributions are purchases that are external to the portfolio. An
external purchase is any purchase that is not a reinvestment, not an "internal"
purchase, and is not associated with a retained distribution. An
"internal" purchase is one where there is a corresponding redemption
within the same portfolio. For example, a purchase of stock paid for with
cash from the default cash account is an internal purchase. A
purchase that is associated with a retained distribution is a purchase in the
default cash account that corresponds to a distributed distribution from an
investment in the portfolio. Contributions also include the
out of pocket
cost of transferred in shares.
Withdrawals:
Withdrawals are redemptions that are external to the portfolio. See
"Contributions" for an explanation of when a transaction is considered external.
Withdrawals also include the out of pocket cost of transferred out shares.
Withdrawn Distributions:
Withdrawn distributions are distributed distributions (cash distributions) that are external to the
portfolio (taken out of the portfolio). This includes any distribution
that is not reinvested and is not retained. A retained distribution is any
distributed distribution that has a corresponding purchase in the portfolio's
default cash account.
The Portfolio Performance report can display cash flow with either Contributions, Withdrawals, and Withdrawn Distributions, or as Invested and Distributed Distributions. All of these figures are also available in the Custom report. The relationship of these figures to each other can be expressed with the following equations:
Invested = Contributions - Withdrawals + Retained Distributions
Distributed Distributions = Withdrawn Distributions + Retained Distributions
Reinvested distributions are not included in any of these calculations. Internal purchases/redemptions and retained distributions are only meaningful for portfolio calculations. When calculating for any object besides a portfolio (investment, symbol, asset type, investment goal, sector, investment type, or currency), contributions are any purchase in that object, withdrawals are any redemption, and all distributed distributions are categorized as withdrawn from that object. (Internal purchases/redemptions and retained distributions are all zero for non-portfolio objects).
Additional Comments:
For purposes of determining portfolio internal/external transactions it is not necessary that one side of the transaction come from a default cash account. This is usually the case, but as long as there is a corresponding entry with the same value and same date anywhere within the same sub-portfolio, the transaction will be considered internal.
All Transfer In/Out transactions are always considered external.