balances in investment accounts, and reconciling
Although MD knows that the critical value for securities is shares, not their current value, it gives us very little help in dealing with share values. In particular, share balances are not shown in registers and there is no way to reconcile share counts except manually, even though share counts are the only thing which can be reconciled other than the Cash Balance. The Cash Balance is given top priority when it should have the lowest priority.
The investment account register shows the Cash Balance, and reconciling the cash balance works fine. For most of us, though, the cash balance is the least important part of an investment account and seldom has a value other than zero. The Securities Detail shows share amounts for transactions, but not a share balance, even though the box to the right is mostly empty and could easily be reorganized to make space for another column. Even worse, ctrl-B (reconcile) while Securities Detail is showing opens the reconcile function for the cash balance instead.
My suggestions:
1) Remove the Cash Balance column from the account register. This will allow other columns to be expanded, which is important because the columns in the account register are already cramped. The Cash Balance is no more important than the share balances in the securities in the account, so it should not have a special place here.
2) Add the Cash Balance to the list of securities in the Securities Detail. (It's already in the Portfolio View.)
3) In the Securities Detail register, add a Balance column, which would be currency for the Cash Balance and shares for other securities. Reorganize the box to the right of the register to make it narrower to provide space for the balance column.
4) When a reconcile is requested in the Securities Detail, reconcile the currently displayed security. (This is how every investment statement I've seen is organized anyway.) When the Cash Balance is selected, reconcile in the currency of the account. For any other security, reconcile in shares.
5) Disable the reconcile function when in Portfolio View or Register. Alternatively, display an extended starting value window which asks which security to reconcile.
Edward
2 Posted by zeke on 14 Apr, 2011 12:18 AM
I would add my vote for #3. It's not easy to track share balances in moneydance. There's a lot of wasted space on the right side of the security detail page that could be used to add a share balance column to the transactions display.
Even better in my opinion would be to make registers in the register view be specific to a security - the current security could be selected from a drop-down list, and security registers would have a share balance column instead of the cash balance column. That way transactions could be edited directly - share purchases and sales would be made from/to any cash account (including the parent account cash balance) w/ a single type of transaction w/o resorting to the awkward split transaction used in the BuyXfr/SellXfr actions (my pet peeve!).
3 Posted by avp2 on 14 Apr, 2011 01:45 AM
I agree with the points made in the original post and like the security selector function addition to the normal register view suggestion of post 2.
To all that, I would add that it would sure be nice to be able to specify an initial (upon creation of the account in MD) cost basis amount for each account security/item.
Support Staff 4 Posted by Tom Freeman on 18 Apr, 2011 02:39 PM
Edward,
The portfolio view, register and security detail all serve different functions. The portfolio view is for the one look overview, the register for a list of transactions, and the security detail window to access individual stock information. I wonder if the needs for a balance would be better served by having the individual securities able to list on the sidebar with share balances under the investment account. This might add the functionality you wish without a radical change to the UI.
The securities detail window does have a share count. Its in the right side window that shows share count, current price, current value, and cost basis.
As to the investment register you can re-size the columns by placing the cursor on the lines in the name fields. And the reconcile happens here because this is where the transactions are downloaded. The security detail window takes the transactions from this page sort and collects it by the individual security.
It seems that the issue is having access to share balances while in the register. Correct me please if i am wrong on that.
Tom
5 Posted by paleolith on 18 Apr, 2011 03:22 PM
Tom,
No, you are wrong. The issue is much larger.
Yes, the securities detail has the CURRENT share count. What's needed is the share balance after each transaction. When I'm looking at an investment statement, I'm often looking at a register which contains subsequent transactions.
I don't understand your statement that my suggestions would constitute a "radical change to the UI". I see these as very small changes, and to areas which mostly do not function as needed now. For example, the cash balance column in the Register panel seldom serves any purpose. (It may on occasion, but rarely.)
Of course I know about resizing columns. The point about a SLIGHT reorganization of the right panel in the securities detail was simply that you could add the share balance without a major change.
You say "the reconcile happens [in the investment register] because this is where the transactions are downloaded". What does that have to do with anything at all? I don't download transactions at all. If I did, the exact same problem would remain: I need to reconcile each security separately AND the cash balance, not just the cash balance. Currently the cash balance is the only thing which MD can reconcile in an investment account, and that's about as close to useless as you can get, since the cash balance is usually zero.
This seems to be the point that you are missing: the need to do multiple reconciliations, one for each security and one for the cash balance, and to know the share balance after each transaction in the register. You are telling me how it works now. I'm telling you that it does not work in a useful way.
As I wrote in point 5 of my OP, one way of doing this would be to start the reconcile from the investment register and display a dialog box where the user selects which security to reconcile. I don't see that as significantly different from starting the reconcile from the Securities Detail panel. (Right now, starting a reconcile from the Securities Detail panel starts a reconcile on the cash balance, which is about as misleading as you can get.)
I'm really pretty frustrated by your apparent lack of understanding of what the problem is. The problem is that MD treats an investment account as a cash balance and the securities as afterthoughts, and that's backwards.
Edward
6 Posted by zeke on 18 Apr, 2011 11:34 PM
I pretty much agree w/ Edward in the sense that it seems like moneydance is pretty much designed to handle cash accounts and support for securities looks like it's kind of tacked on. I can't say I know the proper or conventional way to handle securities in accounting, but they are assets, with the only unit of value that makes sense to me being the share. As such one should be able to track the share balance and reconcile against that, not to mention being able to transfer value to and from other accounts. I'm not sure exactly what securities represent in moneydance. They're kind of like assets, but not really as you can only make transactions w/ the investment account they're in, you can't see any account for the security as you can for other assets, and in the "Income and Expenses, Detailed" report, share purchases actually show up as expenses out from the investment account, producing a negative balance in the account.
7 Posted by avp2 on 19 Apr, 2011 01:54 PM
Just wanted to add a couple comments (more):
I have had investment accounts in about 8 different institutions. In all of those, the cash account was kept near zero with cash balance automatically swept to Money Market funds, i.e. tracking cash as a security is the norm.
MD's security reconciliation process is now less convenient than it could be. The way I end up doing it is to open a calculator, figure the difference in share count between my statement and then enter (or adjusting a downloaded transaction as necessary) a correcting registry entry. This requires shifting between three windows - calculator, register detail and security detail. It could be one less with Edward's suggestion and the calculator would not be needed if MD could do arithmetic within its share count fields.
In MD, "assets" are a type of account) vs the general definition of contra-liability. This can be confusing. It might be better if MD were to change their account type name to a more appropriate term (like real property). MD has also a weakness in keeping clear the distinction between accounts and categories -treating them too much alike when they are really different animals. It is another story, but one that should get some attention. If it did, there might be less trouble with the sign of transactions in category registers, the backwards functioning of the "batch" category and account, year-end closing, etc.
8 Posted by zeke on 19 Apr, 2011 02:07 PM
avp2
Just a quick comment on accounts vs. categories. We recently had a discussion about this. See here: http://help.infinitekind.com/discussions/questions/2535-accounts-vs...
Basically accounts and categories in moneydance are equivalent. "Categories" are income and expense accounts, "Accounts" are assets and liabilities.
9 Posted by avp2 on 19 Apr, 2011 06:32 PM
See my comment in the discussion you reference. Basically, while MD treats accounts and categories quite similarly, it does not handle them identically.
Another major (accounting) difference between accounts and categories is that categories are for temporary (to an accounting/closing period) transaction grouping.
10 Posted by paleolith on 11 May, 2011 11:42 PM
Thanks to avp2 and zeke for the comments re accounts vs categories. However, I hope that further attention to this thread will return to the original issues regarding investment accounts. zeke provided the link to a recent discussion of the other issue.
Support Staff 11 Posted by Tom Freeman on 16 May, 2011 12:58 PM
Hi all,
I just wanted to let you know that we are following this discussion, and now that Moneydance 2011 is finally out, we'll be looking deeper into larger adjustments we'll be making to the next versions of Moneydance. I am putting in a suggestion ticket for better share reconciliation utility, with a specific request to add the functionality of share balances in transactions.
Thanks giving us so much detailed information, and we'll post on this thread when we have more info, or other questions.
Tom
12 Posted by paleolith on 16 May, 2011 02:17 PM
Thanks, Tom!
Edward
13 Posted by zeke on 17 May, 2011 02:00 PM
I am looking forward to whatever changes you make as well. I would reiterate that there is a deeper issue than just reconciling share balances. As said above, I would like to see securities associated directly with actual asset accounts instead of the sort of quasi-entities tied to investment cash accounts. Gnucash has mutual fund, stock, and bond accounts, and I believe Quicken has mutual fund accounts that possess registers displaying balances in share units, support direct transfers to/from other accounts like bank accounts, and so on.
14 Posted by DavidP on 18 Oct, 2011 05:43 AM
Echoing my support for the 'share reconciliation' capabilities. As I've used Moneydance more and more, I'm realizing this is a big inconvenience -- and not one that was evident prior to shifting all my finances into Moneydance.
I'm facing the issue with my 401K account, where I don't need to track the individual share purchases and inter-fund transfers throughout the month. But I do need to reconcile my current share quantity whenever I get a quarterly statement. Ideally I could enter the statement date and the quantity of shares for each fund shown on my statement, and Moneydance would create all the transactions necessary to reconcile the funds in that account.
This automatic reconciliation capability is an extension of the ability to do manual reconciliation that's discussed in the prior posts. It would be extremely useful, and that's how a competing personal budgeting program did "401K Reconciliation" for the many years that I used it.