Fund Manager 2014 - comments and suggestions

[Allan]

I have recently upgraded to FM-2014, and I am very please with a number of the improvements. The addition of a Sector category is a significant improvement, as I previously used Investment Goals to track this. The new import and export features for the categories meant that I was able to transform my data in a matter of a couple of days. I am very pleased with the addition.

I have now relegated the Investment Category to Geographic Region to track the geo investment strategy. Works fine, and I appreciate to now use the "Investment Goal" graphs to display my geo data.

I also track my stocks (in addition to Sector) by Industry and a couple of other personal options. The custom Investment fields are more than sufficient for that and provide the reporting that I would require, however I would really appreciate an import / export facility for the custom investment fields similar to what has been implemented for the categories. I must admit that I have not tested the Transaction Import with the CP field data, and would appreciate a little more details on how this functions. It may address the update issue, but probably means I need to create a dummy transaction to update the customs fields. A little info on this would be appreciated.

As a note, it took me a little while to understand the new feature for summing values across currencies. Because I track my stock movement based on base value (ignoring the currency conversion) I was very pleased to determine that there was a feature where I could allow the summing across currencies. This was not obvious in the documentation and may prove disconcerting to other users who were unaware of the change. One note - my currency portfolio for foreign exchange caused a constant "NA" when included within the reports even though I opted to allow the summing across currencies. My work around was to separate the foreign exchange into their own portfolio and everything else into a portfolio that contained the investments. Then by running reports on the investments only - my reports would then total correctly.

Much thanks for the continued work - this is probably the most significant upgrade in the past 4 years.

Allan

[Mark]

Hi Allan,

Thanks for the comments/feedback. Adding an import/export for the custom investment properties would be a good idea. You can do as you mentioned and use the generic transaction import to set these, but it only applies when creating new investments. Yes, you would need to import a fake transaction into a new investment to set these. You can read about this command here:

http://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/help ... neric.html

See the CIP01 to CIP10 fields.

On the summing across currency issue... What field was reporting as N/A? Was it a value field? If you have the option on to allow summing across currencies you should never see an N/A in a value field to do mixed currencies. If you can reproduce this issue, please let me know the details, so I can try to reproduce it here.

[Allan]

As follow-up, I am attaching 3 reports;

1-with exchange rate adjustment turned off. As documented, "na" appears on the report for values to be converted.
2-with exchange rate adjustment turned on (currency exchange rates excluded). This report displays properly.
3-with exchange rate adjustment turned on, and the folder containing the currency exchange rates is included. As you can note, the exchange rates are proceeded by "na", and the total also contains "na".

To fix this I moved the currencies to their own distinct folder, and moved the investments down a level, so I could run the reports on the investments only.

Allan

[Mark]

Hi Allan,

It looks like you are combining investments with different currencies. Even if you turn on:

Options / Preferences... / Other / Allow Summing Values from Different Currencies

A number will be summed/displayed, but it will be labelled with "na" as the currency symbol if it is from multiple currencies. For example, if you add $10 and EUR 15, it will display na 25.

Also, investments marked as "Exchange Rate" type investments are never exchanged, so it is a good idea to do as you've done, and place them in their own sub-portfolio, so they don't prevent your account totals from displaying. If you wanted to keep them in your same sub-portfolio as your account investments, you should assign these "Exchange Rate" investments to be in your default currency. Usually you do not own shares in these anyway, so it doesn't matter what currency you assign to an Exchange Rate type of investment with zero shares.