Requested Enhancements to Managing Investment Income.

[aviator]

Hi Mark,

One of my goals is to have my investments throw off sufficient income so that I can quit my day job. While Fund Manager does a phenomenal job with just about everything, I'd like to see better ways to track investment income and the effects of taxation on said income.

Below is a laundry list of things that I think would vastly improve Fund Manager. I'll edit this as necessary if I come across other ideas for improvement.

1. Allow fractions of a penny to be entered in the payments/share field in Income tab of security's properties. Currently, only whole cents are allowed. Completed 7/27/2011.

2. On the Income tab of a security's properties, under Payment Dates, add a payment/share field for each date of an expected payment to allow varying amounts throughout the year. Currently, the payments/share field is assumed to be the same for each payment date. Perhaps that should be the default, but allow user to override the amount for each expected payment date.

3. Create the following new reports:

a) Schedule of projected estimated income (by month, quarter, year, etc). Perhaps show actual income to-date, and how it compares to what was estimated (interestingly, this is a report that even my broker cannot provide). There should be columns for dates across the page, not down (as it is today). Allow standard subtotals that are available on other reports.

b) Taxable vs. non-taxable income. Would be very nice if the user could flag a security (or apply a tax percentage) at the state and federal level to differentiate expected gross income vs. net.

[Mark]

Hi aviator,

Thanks for the help/feedback. Item #1 is available now in 11.3 just released today.

We will soon be updating this forum to support attachments. It might be helpful to post an example (like maybe something made in Excel) that shows how you'd like to see the new projected income report, so it is clear how it differs from the current Income Schedule report.

[aviator]

Thanks, Mark. I really appreciate how responsive you are... truly wish everybody I deal with was so quick to respond.

The best part is that the data I initially entered for payment/share was preserved. After I installed the update, I viewed the properties of a few of my investments and it's now displaying the fractional pennies.

Would be happy to create an Excel example. Please post an announcement when the forum software can accept attachments.

Thanks again for being so quick to respond.

[Mark]

Hi aviator,

The forum software has been updated, and now supports attachments.

[aviator]

Hi Mark,

Nice looking forum software!

Attached is an example of a report I'd like to see in Fund Manager. I did it in Excel, and it's a bit crude, but I'm sure you'll understand what I'm trying to see.

Note that some of the screen shot got cut off at the bottom. Please click on the image to see the whole thing.

Thanks.

[Mark]

Hi aviator,

Thanks for the sample report. Short of making a whole new report for this we could add a new custom field for "Predicted Income". You could use this, plus the existing field for actual income and write a user-defined field to calculate the difference. You can put up to 6 date ranges on a Custom report. When you do multiple date ranges, all fields in the report are shown for each date range, so you couldn't format it exactly as you've shown.

[aviator]

Hi Mark,

My attachment actually had two parts (the lower half was cut off, but you can see it if you click on the attachment). Is it possible to allow payment/share for each payment date?

I like the idea of a Predicted Income field, and I think it would serve my purposes. And using a user-defined field for calculating the difference between Predicted and Actual Income would also work. However, I see a couple of problems with the 6 date ranges on a custom report:
1) The duplication of fields eats up valuable real estate on a report. It's also confusing to my client (that is, my wife) who wonders why I'm duplicating fields. It would be nice (very nice) if users had the option of excluding certain fields from duplication, when using multiple dates.
2) Having only 6 date ranges works fine for quarterly or semi-annual reporting, but not so well for monthly. And, unfortunately, I tend to look at just about everything on a monthly basis. It would be very nice if the 6 date ranges could be expanded to 12.

Thanks.

[Mark]

Hi aviator,

I did see the Investment Properties dialog in your attachment. Yes, this is possible to do, and we can consider it for a future update. I understand the value of this change. It is not something likely to make it into any 11.x version though, as it is a more significant change (possibly involving an investment file (*.dat) format change).

I do like the idea of being able to exclude selected fields from repeating for each date range. That would be useful. One other thought: If we had a "Projected Income" built-in field, you could write user-defined fields for each of these different date ranges. Your report would only have one date range, and then these user-defined fields would calculate the built-in fields for varying time periods. This is a little harder for the end user to set up, but it is possible. See the EVAL and all the date functions, like DELTADAYS. With this approach you would have the possibility of creating any number of other date range fields.

[aviator]

I did see the Investment Properties dialog in your attachment. Yes, this is possible to do, and we can consider it for a future update. I understand the value of this change. It is not something likely to make it into any 11.x version though, as it is a more significant change (possibly involving an investment file (*.dat) format change).

Thanks. I understand this is a significant undertaking and I'll wait patiently for it to happen. The benefit is to fine-tune the monthly income expectations, but your fix to display fractions of a penny has already made a big difference in the quality of the data.

One other thought: If we had a "Projected Income" built-in field, you could write user-defined fields for each of these different date ranges. Your report would only have one date range, and then these user-defined fields would calculate the built-in fields for varying time periods. This is a little harder for the end user to set up, but it is possible. See the EVAL and all the date functions, like DELTADAYS. With this approach you would have the possibility of creating any number of other date range fields.

I'll play around with this to see if I can make it work. I'm fairly new to the professional version and the concept of defined fields. My exposure so far had been fairly limited to simple math, but I'll expand my horizons and let you know the outcome.

Thanks.

[aviator]

Your report would only have one date range, and then these user-defined fields would calculate the built-in fields for varying time periods. This is a little harder for the end user to set up, but it is possible. See the EVAL and all the date functions, like DELTADAYS. With this approach you would have the possibility of creating any number of other date range fields.

Hi Mark,

I've played around with your suggestion above (using EVAL and DELTADAYS) and I'm just not getting it to work. Can you post sample code to do what I requested (essentially I want a report that has monthly buckets across the page instead of down. See the attachment I posted further up this thread for an example).

Thanks in advance for your help.

[Mark]

Hi aviator,

We don't currently have the "Projected Income" field described, so you can't get the "Estimated" (and thus "Difference") figures in your sample report. You can get the "Actual" figures though. For example, to write an equation for the recorded Interest Income in May 2011, you could use:

Code: Select all

EVAL(DATE2DAYS(5/1/2011), DATE2DAYS(5/31/2011), IntIncdist_btw)

This would work for any report date settings. If you have a report with an ending date of 5/31/2011, you can use this:

Code: Select all

EVAL(DELTADAYS(ENDDAYS(), 0 , -1 , 0) + 1, ENDDAYS(), IntIncdist_btw)

or with an ending report date of 6/30/2011, you can use this:

Code: Select all

EVAL(DELTADAYS(ENDDAYS(), 0 , -2 , 0) + 1, DELTADAYS(ENDDAYS(), 0 , -1 , 0), IntIncdist_btw)

So, you can write the equations to either use an absolute date range, or relative to the ending report date. To get a field for every month of the year, write a custom field for each month, similar to the above.

[aviator]

Thanks, Mark, this helps a lot. It's working on one of my custom reports, but I intend to use it in others too.