How Do You Keep Track of Your Investments?

We have been searching for an easy to use, Cost Effective, reliable and flexible system for clients to keep track of their portfolio.

We've found a solution - it's called Sharesight.

Sharesight will help you track your holdings and the market prices of your listed shares, bonds and many managed funds and automatically record estimates of dividends you should be receiving. You can also enter other types of investments into it and price them yourself, such as your gold bullion, or your vintage car collection.

It can be difficult enough deciding what to invest in. Then once you have invested, you start facing more challenges.

A few of the questions most investors ask themselves:

1. What investments do I own?
2. How many of them do I own?
3. What are they worth?
4. How have my investments performed?
5. How much income have I received?
6. What should I put on my tax return?

There are many different ways people keep track of their investments including notebooks, paper spreadsheets, computerised spreadsheets and specialised computer programs. Often if the person keeping track of the portfolio can no longer do so the responsibility falls to someone else and they may find the system is difficult to follow or they don't have the right software or passwords and they have to start from scratch.

What happens when you pass away? Will your survivors know how to follow your system? Where to find your notebook? Some people may enjoy it but for many the paperwork that can be involved with an investment portfolio is just drudgery, time wasted preventing us from doing more fun and important stuff like investigating the next investment, gardening, fishing, playing golf or even mowing the lawn.

ShareSight allows you to generate many different reports showing transactions, income and performance across different time periods. It is also useful for generating a report at the end of the year to help prepare your tax return. And as it was developed by Kiwis it follows our tax reporting conventions.

You can set Sharesight so contract notes from many NZ sharebrokers are automatically entered into your portfolio for you.

But please be aware that Sharesight can only ever guess what the situation is, you have to check that the numbers that ShareSight has generated tally with the actual numbers. It is usually 100% accurate but occasionally it gets things wrong. It is getting better and better.

Sharesight is a reporting tool. It doesn't have direct access to your actual investments, you can't use it to actually perform transactions. So it can't get access to your investments and steal your money. For information on the extensive range of reports see Sharesight Reporting Tools.

Sharesight is an internet based application, it lives in "The Cloud" so is of no use to you unless you have access to a computer connected to the internet.

For an even better solution click here to read about an Integrated Reporting Solution - Xero and Sharesight

Bay Financial Partners are a Sharesight Pro Partner

As a Sharesight Pro Partner we can access the Sharesight system and offer it to our clients. We pay Sharesight on a per portfolio per month basis.

For $19.95 a month we will open a Sharesight Pro Portfolio for you and:

• Populate it with your investment portfolio as currently recorded in our system.
• Record all future investment buy and sell transactions that you initiate through us.
• You will have direct access to the on-line account and be able to generate your own reports and add transactions that you don't do through us.
• You can also instruct us to give access to any other parties you wish, such as your spouse or partner, accountant, other trustees or trust beneficiaries.
• Your Sharesight Pro Portfolio from Bay Financial Partners will give you all the facilities of the $25.33 a month Sharesight subscription but with the advanced reporting of the Expert Plan.
• You can add portfolios for $17.50 per portfolio per month.
• If you want us to check your income distributions are correct you can send us copies of the Distribution Notices. There will be charge of $57.50, for that we will verify 10 distributions, after that there will be an additional charge of $5.75 per distribution.

Please note with Sharesight we are providing a platform for you to use. We are not offering to do your reporting for you, or printing and posting. If you want us to do the reporting for you this may or may not be the appropriate platform and there will be additional charges, call us to discuss your requirements.

Interested? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to request further information about opening a Bay Financial Partners Sharesight Pro Portfolio and start freeing yourself from the drudgery of paperwork.

If you would like to use Sharesight directly they offer three subscription levels:

• Free - limited to 10 shareholdings. This is probably adequate if you have basic investment reporting needs. and less than 10 investments.
• Starter - $12.00 a month billed annually - $144.00) or $16.00 billed monthly - Unlimited shareholdings/investments on one portfolio, Basic Reports, and ability to share access to your account with others, such as your accountant, or us. Suitable for people with one portfolio and simple reporting needs.
• Investor - $29.00 a month billed annually - $348.00 or $38.67 billed monthly - As above plus four different portfolios and more advanced reporting. Suitable if you have more than one portfolio, perhaps individual and joint portfolios or investments in the name of a trust.
• Expert - $49.00 a month billed annually - $588.00 or $65.33 billed monthly - As above plus ten different portfolios and far more advanced reporting including Foreign Investment Fund Report, Traders Tax Report and Multi-Currency Valuation. This is the best one if you have more than $50,000 invested offshore.

If you are interested why not check out Sharesight at www.sharesight.com/nz it cost nothing to give it a try.

The Sharesight or Sharesight Pro subscription requires no contract and you can cancel at any time. All our prices on this page include gst.