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Quick Reports
by  sharepoint\mattabar  on 11/26/2011 12:50 PM
Category: Software

Some of the feedback we’ve gotten over the last year is that FinFolio reports should be easier to print. Currently you print reports using the report wizard, which simplifies the process for large print jobs with report packages having many parameters. But it is a bit clunky to use when you just want to see a single report for a few folios. Based on feedback from our advisors, we’re rolling out a new feature in the next release called “Quick Reports”.

Here's how it works:

1. From any View or Edit screen, select one or more folios.

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2. On the Reporting ribbon, click the Print button and select a report.

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3. The report immediately prints and displays.

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And that’s it! You’re never more than two clicks away from any report in FinFolio.

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Analyzing Calculations
by  sharepoint\mattabar  on 10/15/2011 1:37 PM

“Can you tell me why this rate of return is so low?”

A big part of portfolio management support is helping advisors determine how calculations arrive at their results. In Techfi, we had a rate of return wizard that would show you the excruciating detail behind the performance calculations—it was a well loved feature of the support team because it let them answer tough questions from advisors about their performance numbers.

But FinFolio has larger, more varied calculation library, and we needed better analysis tools. We’ve recently added an analysis framework that allows us to expose any of our calculations so advisors and our support team can see what’s going on under the covers.

You can open an analysis screen by clicking Analysis on the Report ribbon.

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On the analysis screen you can select (a) a folio, (b) the calculation to analyze, and (c) a date range. You can also massage any properties and settings of specific calculations. When you click the image button, FinFolio will run the calculation and display all the intermediate steps that the calculation logic takes to arrive at the final number.

Here’s an example of the analysis of a market value calculation. Market value can include many sub-components like accrued income for bonds, which may cause it to be different from the market value you get from, say, a planning system that doesn’t calculate accruals.

(FYI, you can disable accrued income and other sub-components of market value in FinFolio.)

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The structure of the analysis text differs depending on which calculation is being analyzed. Here’s another example where it displays the details behind an internal rate of return.

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You can also tweak specific calculation properties for each analysis. This makes it easy to see how specific settings affect the underlying logic.

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This is a new feature that really seems to be appreciated by our clients. Although its biggest fans are on our support team. ;-)

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Color-Coded Groups
by  Matt Abar  on 7/16/2011 4:44 PM

Last Friday we rolled out two major enhancements to grouping:

  1. Created "static" color-coded groups that make it easy to lock down item groupings across large numbers of items.
  2. Moved the dynamic group functionality into the search bar, making it more accessible for the average user.

You customize groups with the Edit Groups screen. Each group can have a color assigned, which makes it easy to see missing groups from the main Views. Groups can be placed *within* other groups, allowing sophisticated hierarchies with minimal data entry. See the screen below where I placed the "Top" group within the "TLC" group:

Group Editor

Once groups have been created, select one more accounts/clients/securities/etc. on any list and right-click (or use the groups ribbon button) to place them in a group. This is also how you remove items from a group. You can add different item types to the same group. (i.e. put both securities and accounts in an "Immediate Review" group)

You can see item groups on every main View and all edit screens. When a group contains another group, the indirectly linked groups show up in grey at the end of the group list.

Each item type has a new "by Groups" view:

Any view can be filtered to show items in a group using the new search bar:

You can group almost anything, including households, portfolios, clients, accounts, securities, models and fee schedules. Groups can be used for billing, reporting, rebalancing and everything else in FinFolio.

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Multi-Currency
by  Matt Abar  on 3/5/2011 12:33 AM

I know from experience that it's very difficult to add multi-currency after you've created a portfolio mangement system. It needs to be added at a core level and affects every report and calculation.

Currency needs to be accounted for when you bill, rebalance, or perform any other action on your accounts. I don't like using the word impossible but it would have taken a *long* time to retroactively add multi-currency to Techfi and other systems I've built.

But this ain't our first time at the rodeo. We designed FinFolio to handle multiple currencies from the outset (despite a lack of multi-currency firms in the beta group). We knew how important it was longer-term so we did the work up front to made sure it was there.

How It Works

A local currency is entered on the security and account holdings inherit their currency from the base security. You can set a display currency at the account level, allowing you to have a common reporting currency when your account holds positions of different currencies.

Setting the global system currency determines the currency in which all your main lists will display. You can (optionally) specify currencies to use on each report, report column and in various places like on fee schedules or on the Positions tab.

FX Rates

You can see FX rates on the Exchange Rate screen, which lets you both view and edit. FinFolio lets you enter specific country-to-country exchange rates and doesn't force everything through one system currency. This prevents the currency rounding errors that you see in some other portfolio management systems.

You don't have to hand-enter the FX rates; you can import them automatically from various pricing sources. Plus if you're a bit behind or otherwise don't have an FX rate for a certain day, FinFolio will find the most recent rate to calculate your values (just like prices).

Positions

When you display values or calculations in FinFolio, you can specify which currency to use. You can tell FinFolio to display values in the Local, System and Account currencies or select a specific currency. I'll give you some examples using our Positions tab, which is on many of our edit screens.

By default, the positions tab shows you current values in the local security currency for folio positions. Notice each currency is formatted correctly for the country and it's smart enough not to sum the columns.

On the next screenshot, I specified an as-of date and changed the currency to GBP. FinFolio now uses the FX rate and price on my date, totaling the values at the bottom of the list. All of this happens in real-time.

There's also a Positions tab on the Security edit screen which shows a cross-reference of accounts that own the security. Very handy.

Reports

Instead of building a new batch of reports to support multi-currency we let you adjust the currency on our standard reports. You can select a reporting currency for each report, or you can set a currency for individual columns. Using some of the custom reports, you could add several currency columns, each one showing the Market Value (or other calculation) in a different currency.

It's not just market values--all of the calculations are sensitive to multi-currency. We even expose the cash flow valuation currency on the return calculation. You can also set the currency on charts.

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Welcome Doug
by  Matt Abar  on 11/7/2010 11:36 PM

I’d like to welcome Doug Moses to FinFolio.

I got my big break with a company called Investment Advisory Network (IAN), building their technology platform and staffing the development team. IAN had a great sales team and Doug was their top salesperson. He had a good sense of what our technology could do and how it could be applied in different situations for different firms.

After I left to start Techfi, I heard stories about how Doug shepherded IAN through their SS&C acquisition and stuck around for several years making sure the transition was a good one for IAN’s clients. Doug’s a great guy and I’m glad we have a chance to work together again.

Doug comes out of a traditional finance background (Citibank, Morgan Stanley) but has been doing startups for the last ten years or so. His hire fills a critical key role on our executive team and signifies a shift toward a more client-driven development strategy.

RiaBiz did a quick hit on Doug’s hire here. You can also see a short bio for Doug here.

...

FinFolio is crazy busy right now, which is why I haven’t been blogging much. When you do enough startups, you start to see patterns--one of which occurs between the initial product release to when the first 20-30 clients are up and running. Until we have enough client implementations under our belt to standardize the process, the founders/developers need to be closely involved in making each one successful. Techfi stumbled a bit with this which is makes us hyper-sensitive to it this time around.

It’s important to build a continuous improvement feedback loop that channels everything back into the product. We’re using all this client feedback to push toward a V2 release with an expanded feature set and other client-driven improvements. Doug’s hire takes some load off of Tom and myself and I hope to blog about the new functionality soon.

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