By Matt Abar on 8/21/2008 2:52 PM

The import framework is complete and we're ready to start adding custodians. In this post I discuss some of the speed challenges we overcame, and list the import features.

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By Matt Abar on 8/14/2008 9:43 AM

To date, our industry has not had software that can be customized for specific financial firms. FinFolio has been designed from the ground up to be extensible and customizable. We can add all types of custom features for individual firms, from new reports to new screens to custom rebalancing modules.

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By Matt Abar on 7/11/2008 3:23 PM

FinFolio has multicurrency built in at a core level. In Example #5 we create some currencies and FX rates and demonstrate valuing accounts in different currencies. With a real FinFolio database, the currencies would already exist and would be loaded into memory when the environment is initialized.

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By Matt Abar on 7/1/2008 11:08 AM

As I mentioned before, the blog will get somewhat technical over the next week as we walk through some of the examples in the developer preview. I'll start with Example #4, which is a good introduction to the FinFolio objects.

The first line of every example is the InitializeConfiguration call that sets up the FinFolio environment. For now, we're creating the FinFolio database from scratch in every example, so it takes a few seconds. Initializing the environment does a few things. It establishes a connection to the database and loads all of the plug-in modules. Most of our functionality operates through the plug-in framework.

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By Matt Abar on 6/30/2008 7:52 PM

We just posted the developer release to the site. This is a toolkit for writing macros, automating downloads, and building extensions on top of our framework. There aren't any screens in this release, nothing but code. If you aren't an intermediate to advanced Microsoft .Net developer (or have one on staff), this is not the time to dive in--wait for the beta.

I'm very happy with our progress so far. All of our different development branches were tied together over the last couple weeks, and the end result is a clean, cohesive portfolio management engine. We're eager to get feedback from other developers.

Most of the last six months has been spent playing with different technolgies, without much concern for time or completing specific functionality. We'll still be making many changes, but this release represents an internal shift from "ivory tower" mode into "let's build a product" mode...

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By Matt Abar on 6/25/2008 12:30 PM

It has been our busiest month yet, as evidenced by the lack of blog posts. We've been preparing the code drop for our Developer Release, which involves tying together all the different modules we've been working on. While the rest of the team toils, I'm going to talk about one of the bigger issues we've been dealing with over the past few months--data persistence, which is developer-speak for "saving information in the database".

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By Matt Abar on 5/23/2008 9:35 AM

We finally locked down the cost module last week--our biggest headache so far. As you enter transactions, whether via import or data entry, FinFolio allocates your tax lots using your specified allocation.

It does LIFO, FIFO, Highest, Lowest, Average, and Specific Lot. A neat thing about Specific Lot--you set the top-level allocation type to Specific Lot, then you can set the lot type on individual transactions to LIFO/FIFO/Highest/Lowest. This means you can do fine-grained lot allocation without the headache of having to calculate the lots yourself. And you can still allocate them manually if you'd like.

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By Matt Abar on 4/15/2008 10:43 AM

I hesitate to even call this a milestone. We needed something simple to flesh out how the Calculation structure works. And Mike and I have written rates of return so often we could almost do it in our sleep. It took about a week, with much of it being spent perusing my library of rate of return books, looking for new formula tricks (there weren't any).

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By Matt Abar on 4/9/2008 5:15 PM

We've been waiting for the development framework to be completed before adding staff. It's getting close and should be solid enough by May or June. So we're starting our search for two Denver-based positions. All of the positions come with stock, salary based on experience, and all the fun and excitement of working with a cutting-edge, fully funded startup company.

• Director - Professional Services
• Senior Developer - Microsoft C# .NET

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By Matt Abar on 4/2/2008 2:42 PM

Our strategy for feature implementation is to take the hardest features, and those most likely to change our database/object structure, and implement those first. We recently discovered that the Portfolio/Account views were going to be difficult to implement, so we put cost accounting on hold. This is a long post because the concept is very tricky and positively impacts many areas of the software.

There are two separate "views" of the data in FinFolio, one to represent the legal system-of-record data (Account view) and one to mirror the firm's view of the client positions (Portfolio view). This lets us maintain the integrity of the system-of-record data and preserve the layout for data imports, while allowing advisors to specify a completely different reporting structure that can be used for modeling and printing client reports.

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