Cash Flow Report

[AssetHound]

I have a nice custom report that shows cash flow (distributions) YTD and the next expected distribution. It was difficult to add the income dates and data for all securities and if there was some way to make that easier it would be a big help. For swing portfolios, this would be a big job to manually maintain -- maybe even precluding the use of a good report.

I wanted to see expected cash flow for the rest of this quarter and run the report each quarter, but it looks like that's not possible? You only get the rest of the current year so you have to manually add up for the quarter.

All in all, a nice reporting tool. But, if we could make the income data entry easier for individual holdings, that would be a big help. I'm not sure it's so important to know the exact day a distribution is expected -- just the month would be fine.

Thanks for the good work.

[Mark]

Hi AssetHound,

Thanks for the feedback. I understand setting those income properties can be tedious.

Are you using this field in the Custom report: "Next income value"? If so, this will show you the next expected income amount after the current report's ending date. So, if you want to know what income to expect after Q3 of this year, set the ending report date to 9/30/2012. You can also use an "Income Schedule" report, and set the specific date range you want, so you could look at just 10/1/1012 to 12/31/2012 if you wanted to see the expected income in just Q4.

[AssetHound]

Thanks for the income schedule tip. That will take care of my quarterly income planning.

Regarding data entry, do we really need the exact date each month that some income is expected? I would think that just knowing in what month the income occurs would be sufficient, and that would make data entry easier since you could click on months from a list rather than having to look at a daily calendar for each month. It would work for me.

Thanks.

[Mark]

Hi AssetHound,

I suspect some people may want to know specific dates. If you're only concerned about the month, you can just ignore the day field. If you just put your cursor in the date field, on the month, you can type in a number from your keyboard. This might be easier than using the popup calendar to select the month.