Background:
- I am using FM Pro and am currently converting my wife to FM Personal from Captools.
- We live in Canada and cannot retrieve transactions from our brokerage house
and must enter transactions manually and reconcile manually.
- I have not purchased Personal yet because there is a significant difference in how
to reconcile between FM and Captools.
- I suspect my wife will not accept FM's approach as it exists today.
- Hence my request for enhancements to the Reconcile process.
Our current Procedure for month end processing:
- At month end we manually enter the monthly transactions as reported on the Broker
statement.
- We update stock prices for the month end date (manually or by download).
- We then produce a month end Portfolio Value report and compare that to the Broker
statement.
- Errors are corrected with manual updates - typically by correcting the price using a
calculator.
- Finding the error cause in this manner is not trivial and could be improved
significantly, I believe.
Proposed Improvement - add function to the Manual Reconciliation Tool:
- add columns for:
- No. of Shares (not editable, just for information)
- Statement Balance (editable)
- Price for Statement Date (editable)
all fields filled in with Fund Manager values when showing the Manual Share Balance
window.
- The user would then enter the Statement value for either Statement Balance or Price
- If the Statement & Fund Manager columns disagree, then FM would recalculate and save
the other column as follows:
Change -- Update
Column -- Column
====== -- ======
Balance -- Price
Price -- Balance
- If the user double-clicked the Price field, FM would open the Portfolio edit window
I believe this will offer a significantly simpler reconciliation process for those
who cannot use the automated one. I trust you agree.
Sorry for the long post. If you need clarification, please ask
Thanks - Lloyd