reports, graphs and security detail views

zeke's Avatar

zeke

10 Aug, 2010 02:47 AM

I am quite new to Moneydance after recently switching from Quicken 2003. I am happy to say that I am very impressed w/ Moneydance's clear and logical organization and overall simplicity of use. For the most part it appears that it contains all the tools we need to manage our family's finances. In the original draft of this post I simply listed some details that I thought could be improved. However, I realized these details added up to the conclusion that in terms of investments I don't think Moneydance is particularly well designed to fully address the preferences of an investor like myself. My investments are almost exclusively in mutual funds and I pretty much buy and hold these funds as much as possible. I am mainly saving for long-term goals like retirement and kids' college tuition. Virtually all of my investments produce capital gains and dividend distributions. Below I've described some ways that - in my opinion of course - Moneydance could be improved as filling the needs of someone w/ a similar profile (not sure how common such a creature might be):

  • Most of my funds are single mutual funds from different vendors, and there is no cash balance - purchases or sales are made by transfers to other accounts. I would like to see an account type for this sort of investment showing, for instance, the share balance in the register, not the cash balance, which is irrelevent.

  • The Security detail and Portfolio view pages only contain information about share value over time. I don't think I have a single investment for which that information tells the whole story. I am more interested in total ROI including capital gains and dividend distributions. I would really like to see an avg. annual % ROI on both of these pages for the displayed securities. On the Security Detail page I would also like to see a graph of the total account balance and cost basis over time plotted on the same graph, either instead of or side-by-side w/ the price graph. A graph showing annual ROI over time would be useful as well for looking at volatility.

  • The Portfolio report only includes 1,3, and 5 year columns. I would really like to see an additional column w/ "All dates" for the purpose of assessing long-term performance.

  • One specific Graph I would like to see is a bar chart comparing my investments' average annual % ROIs. This is one graph that Quicken included that gives a nice snapshot comparison of my investments.

  1. 1 Posted by Brian Adler on 24 Aug, 2010 04:11 PM

    Brian Adler's Avatar

    Zeke,

    By creating a mutual fund as a new security (from the securities detail) you can enter that fund in your register and it will include the number of shares you have in that fund. Are your funds not denominated in a price per share (and therefore a total value of your holdings) method?

    How did you work with this information in Quicken? Can you create a screen shot of how you have tracked these funds in the past and how you would find it useful to see them tracked in Moneydance or are you describing a suggestion that was also not available in Quicken? The "investment performance" report does show return % and annual ROI %.

    Are your other suggestions descriptions of how you tracked your investments in Quicken? Once I have a more clear understanding of your request, I can create a ticket attached to this case making the suggestion to our developers.

    The requests of your last two bullet points seem clear enough and we may be able to implement them in the future.

    Sincerely,

    Brian Adler

    Moneydance Support

  2. 2 Posted by zeke on 24 Aug, 2010 11:36 PM

    zeke's Avatar

    Brian
    Thanks for the response. I don't want to make mountains out of molehills but I will try to clarify the first two points above:

    The moneydance investment acct seems modeled after a broker's acct - I"m guessing, never had one - where one can move securities into or out of a cash balance in the account. My investments are all in single mutual funds from separate vendors. The only transactions are buying and selling shares where the proceeds are transferred to checking or savings accounts. There is no "cash balance" in the mutual fund account, so the cash balance column in the acount's register is of zero information value.

    RE the portfolio and security detail views - basically under my circumstances these don't really show that much information I'm interested in. For example:

    In the "portfolio view" the "allocation" graph takes up like 60% of the real estate but in my mutual fund accounts the allocation is always 100% so this has zero information value for me. The table at the top only has share value as an indicator of investment performance, which is important, but incomplete. I would prefer info on the ROI. I have several funds with negative changes in share price over time but substantial positive returns because of capital gains and dividend distributions.

    In the "security detail" view, similar comments apply. The emphasis is on share value - the share value graph takes up like 50% of the real estate, but it's not that interesting to me. I suggested a couple of possibilities for alternatives that would be interesting to me - I want to see how the investment is growing, including total return, not just share value. I also want to know about volatility of my investments, which was the idea for the other graph of ROI over time.

    I'm aware that much of the information I am talking about is available if I craft the right reports, but the main point is that, as I said, the security and portfolio views aren't really much value to me.

  3. 3 Posted by Brian Adler on 28 Aug, 2010 05:09 PM

    Brian Adler's Avatar

    Zeke,

    I understand your points better now. There may be a way that in the future that the investment account can be made to be more customizable such that a user with your needs could have it suit the purpose you're describing and a user with a traditional brokerage account could use it for that purpose. We can discuss that in future development meetings and I have created a suggestion ticket from your inquiry to that end.

    Best,

    Brian

    Moneydance Support

  4. 4 Posted by hoovmoss on 04 Sep, 2010 02:42 AM

    hoovmoss's Avatar

    Just to chime in here, I have the same kind of investments as zeke. I'm currently demoing three applications to replace Quicken, and Moneydance is definitely the front runner. But I really do miss seeing the Shares balance in my investment accounts.

    All three of the programs I'm trying out use the brokerage model, and from what I've experimented with so far, Moneydance is the easiest to use for separate mutual fund tracking. I really appreciate the BuyXfr option, which is not available in the other apps as near as I can tell. Moneydance is also the only one that imported my info correctly from Quicken.

  5. 5 Posted by Angie Rauscher on 05 Sep, 2010 01:11 AM

    Angie Rauscher's Avatar

    Kabing,

    I'm glad to hear Moneydance is working well for you, and we'll discuss this feature request in our development meeting. Thanks for chiming in, we very much value our user's input. We'll post here if/when we have an update on this feature request

    Angie Rauscher
    Moneydance Support

  6. 6 Posted by zeke on 05 Sep, 2010 02:38 PM

    zeke's Avatar

    I'm getting the feeling that my original comments were taken to be mainly about the structure of investment accounts and registers. I just wanted to emphasize that my main point, stated poorly in my rambling posts, is that in terms of investments the main emphasis in moneydance seems to be on investors actively trading stocks as opposed to someone investing mainly in mutual funds with a long-term outlook. For example, as I mentioned, the most easily available information, in the portfolio and security detail views, isn't really of value to someone w/ my style of investing (and opinions!). I guess I would like more information more easily available, including graphs, about total ROI and total value over time of my investments (individually and collectively). Others may have other opinions, but that's the way I see it. Thanks for your attention in this issue.

  7. 7 Posted by Tom Freeman on 05 Sep, 2010 05:49 PM

    Tom Freeman's Avatar

    Zeke,

    Have you tried the Investment Performance report. It may provide some of what you are looking for.

    Also you can customize you account balance report to only list your investments. While it does list the account balance by dollar amount, it also gives you a share count as well.

    Tom

  8. 8 Posted by zeke on 05 Sep, 2010 09:05 PM

    zeke's Avatar

    Hi Tom
    I have looked at the Performance report, and it does give useful information. I think the Portfolio report is potentially more useful, but it only gives numbers over a max of 5 years. This is the one that I think I mentioned as needing an "all dates" column to be more complete. As another example, the only way I can get a picture of my individual investment accounts total value over time is to take the "Net worth" graph, edit it to include only one account, and plot each account one-by-one I don't need this info on a day-to-day basis, but when I do want to look at it, it is quite tedious to get it. This is an example of the kind of info that I think would be useful to have on the portfolio overview and/or security detail pages that would be much more useful to me than what's there. It would actually be very useful of course to tailor these displays to include the info that each user wants to see.

  9. 9 Posted by Tom Freeman on 06 Sep, 2010 06:13 PM

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    Zeke,

    We have a ticket in with the developers. They will look into the possibility of added customization of the investment reporting.

    Tom

  10. System closed this discussion on 31 Mar, 2015 03:30 PM.

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