Contributions / withdrawals in portfolio with sub-portfolios

[tjhughes72]

Hi Mark,

I have a portfolio which contains four sub-portfolios, each one for different currencies. The currencies are GBP (my base currency), USD, AUD and EUR.

I am trying to look at the performance report for a six month period, and also to track the total amount of contributions and withdrawals in that period. My understanding of a "contribution" is money that has come in to the portfolio, so in my case this is an investor putting cash into the default cash account of the relevant sub-portfolio. I know that a "contribution" could also be an injection of another assets e.g. shares but this doesn't apply for this portfolio (and series of sub-portfolios).

The problem is that I have money moving around between sub-portfolios. For instance I used pounds (GBP) to buy Euros which were then used to buy Euro denominated shares. So in this example I sold GBP from my sterling default cash account in the GBP sub-portfolio and bought Euros in my Euro default cash account in the EUR sub-portfolio.

FundManager has marked both these transactions as withdrawals and contributions. So my sale of GBP is marked as a withdrawal and my purchase of Euros is marked as a contribution.

When I run the reports for the individual sub-portfolios the external movements (i.e. contributions and withdrawals) show up as I would expect. But when I try and look at everything at the top portfolio level the contribution and withdrawal figures include the movements between sub-portfolios so the figures at the bottom of the performance report are misleading. I would like to see the total contributions / withdrawals for the whole portfolio, ignoring movements between the various sub-portfolios but I don't know how to see this.

Can you help?

Kind regards,

Tom.

[Mark]

Hi Tom,

Unfortunately, you cannot do this currently. Contributions/withdrawals are always relative to sub-portfolios. If you move money between sub-portfolios and report at a higher level, these inter sub-portfolio movements will show as you're seeing. This is a feature we hope to offer as an improvement in a future version.

[tjhughes72]

OK thanks Mark.

Tom

[tjhughes72]

Hi Mark (again!),

This issue of not being able to report performnace in portfolios with sub-porftolios is becoming a bit of an issue for me. At the moment I have to maintain Excel spreadsheets with snapshots of the portfolios at various moments in time as I can't accurately show the performance for a given portfolio.

Do you have any suggestions as to how I could manage all of this in Fund Manager? I see that you've just launched the Beta version of v11 and I'm not sure if this feature is in this - is it?

Kind regards,

Tom.

[Mark]

Hi Tom,

Yes, this change was added to 11.0. If you look in the change list for 11.0 Beta, you'll see this:

"Changed determination of internal versus external transaction to allow finding a corresponding match on any investment anywhere in the sub-portfolio, and not just the default cash account within the immediate sub-portfolio. Helpful for not counting inter-account buys/sells of cash as contributions/withdrawals when reporting at higher level."