Added "Investments" tab

When recording an investment purchase, there is already the option to enter Qty and price

Most investment purchases would also have fees and commissions and it would be good to be able to record them as well

What about dividend and interest payments?

Some way to associate them with the investment is required

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Yes one of my points included tracking earnings to the investment.

I was thinking if we had a “Beta” tag next to investments tab that would make it easier for the developer to make significant changes further down the line without users being frustrated by it.

Possibly for Projects tab as well.

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I can see the advantage of introducing small changes / parts / features to Manager at a time. But feel significant features ought to be further developed in terms of functionality before going live. It is really great from end user perspective though to see movement in ideas suggested. Love the direction Manager is going, much appreciated and thank you.

From what I can see is that Manager is using some kind of Agile development approach. An explanation of such approach is for example at What is AGILE? - What is SCRUM? - Agile FAQ's | Cprime .

Manager uses short development cycles with imperfect and even sometimes buggy releases and where with the aid of the users the bugs get fixed and the application perfected. There are many advantages to this approach and I do not think Manager would be what it is today if not implementing it, despite some insecurities for us as users.

You can yourself decide how frequent you want to update Manager but I would recommend to at least follow those updates that are listed under “releases”. You also will need to accept that it is a continuous work in progress and the more you help the Developer to find bugs and essential for all users suitable improvements the better the product will become.

My only worry is that there seem to be too many imperfect simultaneous developments, be it this investment tab, the user portals, the immature inventory, etc. that gives a much larger sense of instability and incompleteness. In my view focusing on fewer and going just a bit deeper to be more complete would be a much more effective approach while maintaining efficiency inherent to Agile approaches.

We should all try not to to turn this topic into another topic where we discuss how features are added to Manager. We should make this topic a fruitful discussion for the improvement of the Investment module.

We should appreciate the good work being done.
Kindly limit your comments to features/improvements of the Module. Your improvement ideas :bulb: is the reason Lubos created the topic.

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Great idea @Abeiku, please start the new topic.

It would depend on the accounting requirements on every country or GAAP. On IFRS, you must decide whether the investment will be disposed short/long term at the beginning because the accounting of the realized gains is different on each case.

I understand what he’s asking for is for the flexibility to account for it accordingly.

@lubos control account is not available for investment currently, hope to implement it soon

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I have given several Analyzer/Machine to my customers Free of Cost.

The ownership of these analyzers is mine.

Customers only purchase consumables for those Analyzers regularly.

Should I put these Analyzers to Investment Tab?

No it is not part of investment tab which was established for trading in stock / shares.

The Analyzers are your assets and should be recorded in Manager as such and the payments you made to purchase these assets should be recorded against them. You sell the consumables so I assume you would invoice the customers for that and record the receipts as part of income (sales) or you just take receipts straight away against sales.

New to this Forum.
Like the new Investments functionality, Lubos. It is a good addition.

I am using Special and Control Accounts for recording Investments and this work-around delivers an adequate solution. The Custom Reports also provide the required listings (Summary and Detail levels) to track quantity, costs and simple gain/loss on disposal (using a manually calculated average cost of sale input for the disposed quantity).

However, to record changes like, say demergers, the Journal Entry Form does not have the “qty” field input (to register quantity of shares received arising from the demerger corporate action); thus, I use a bank clearing/suspense account to record respective payment and receipt to effect the demerger transaction.
Will it be a significant programme modification to include of the “qty” field in the Journal Entry Form?
This will be to put quantity and or cost changes through to the special account used as the Investment registers.

And I think this addition should also work similarly within the Investments functionality under consideration/construction.

Journal entries already include a quantity field in the only context where it makes sense, transactions involving the Inventory on hand account—after an inventory item has been chosen. And that is only because financial and quantity aspects of inventory ledgers are separate in Manager. Otherwise, journal entries only move portions of account balances, not “countable” things. And a journal entry would not be able to post your quantity anywhere or do anything with it.

To have Manager track quantities, you would need to treat shares as inventory items. There have been many discussion in the forum about how to do that over the years. Do not misunderstand me. I am not saying tracking investments with inventory features is a convenient solution; it is not. That is what led to introduction of the Investments tab. But the developer (above in this very thread) acknowledges that more capabilities are needed. The Investments tab right now is really just a placeholder for future developments. I think you should not hope that those developments will include jamming investment management features into journal entries. Think about the very example you gave: a stock split or merger does not change account balances, so there would be nothing to debit or credit.

@ Tut, Thanks for a very quick response.
Yes, Inventory is an overkill solution for Investments - though principles are very similar.

Simplicity and the ease of use provide for good User Experience of Manager without detracting from the functionality of the solution for complex transactions.

Perhaps, I was not clear enough in previous question: expanding on the example of demerger - this involved:

  1. creation of a new Investment for the demerged entity - different Account/Code
  2. increase in Amount/Cost and quantity held in the new Investment
  3. reduction of the Amount/Cost - of the Old Account/Code
    The 2 entry solution (1 payment and 1 receipt) used works.

Sorry to reiterate but please do reconsider how quantity and cost tracking in Investments for events such as stock splits, consolidation and mergers/demergers which all (sorry to contradict) do involve a change of the quantity held, and in some cases also a return of capital, should be transacted (i.e. use the 2 entry solution above or an inter Investment Transfer etc…).

This is not something for me to consider. I’m a forum moderator, not the developer. There is a long way to go before the Investments tab is suitable for real-life investment management.

Using Manger v22.3.4

I want to divide and report my share investments in the following groups

  • Australian shares
  • International shares
  • Listed property
  • Probably others in the future

I assumed I would do this in Manager via user entered control accounts for Investments. Looking in
Settings → Control Accounts
I can define Control accounts for:

But not “Investments”

Am I missing something or is this functionality not available?
Is there a work around or are most people just not classifying their share investments while waiting for the functionality to be added.

So how are you actually using Control accounts with Manager Investments?

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Just checked yesterday after updating. This functionality is not yet available.

He is probably saying that he doesn’t use Investments tab but, instead he created different Special Accounts under Custom Accounts.

Oh, that would make sense

Manager’s investment tab does create a “Capital gains on investments”.
Is this a first in first out calculation (desirable) or some other method?

A use case for first in first out is:
Tax on Capital gains is levied at a discounted rate in Australian if the asset has been held for over a year. As a result when selling shares there is a tax advantage in selling those which have been held for over 12 months first (on the basis that when you later sell more shares, more of the remaining may also be eligible for the discounted tax rate). This tax minimisation strategy is achieved by selling the shares which have been held for more than 12 months first (first in first out approximating this best).

Please don’t assume that what might be a wise strategy in your situation should be imposed, or even a default choice, for others. Different jurisdictions have different regulations, offering different options to investors. There can be valid reasons for using other methods for calculating capital gains.