Milestone - Rate of Return

We needed something simple to flesh out how the Calculation structure works. I've written rates of return so often I could almost do it in my 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.

This time, I used Mathematica to take the iterative guessing process out to a 6th degree polynomial. I don't think it's any more accurate but the code certainly looks impressive--pages of nothing but complicated, error-prone formulas, although there shouldn't be any errors since Mathematica did all the work. I cut my teeth at dbCAMS by debugging and rewriting their IRR formula when I was still on the support team. And I've rewritten it from scratch several times at other companies. The first time I wrote it completely from scratch it took me more than a month to perfect it, and it involved solving polynomials by hand. So I'm pretty pleased at how quickly we were able to do it this time.

Topics: Development

FinFolio is Hiring

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.

Topics: Hiring Development

Milestone - Account/Portfolio Views

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.

This should give advisors complete flexibility in mapping accounts, but remove complexity at report printing time. As I've been talking to advisors, I've heard several stories about having to re-print quarterly reports because you selected an incorrect option before clicking Print. With the Portfolio/Account structure you can set it once when the account is imported and keep the same structure for the life of the account.

Topics: Development