michaelc
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Post by michaelc on Nov 19, 2017 17:49:27 GMT
I'm trying to find a way to determine how much I have made (or lost) each calendar month over the past year or three. Is this difficult to achieve?
So far, I've seen the "tax statement" sort of gives me what I want but its fiddly to select all the dates for each month manually and it isn't very transparent.
I've also downloaded the transaction statements for a given month and probably naively summed the total paid-in and paid-out but that didn't seem to give me what I wanted which I think is because a lot of the "money out" was actually new investment which in terms of my overall exposure at FC is a neutral transaction.
What do other people do to track their overall gains/losses ?
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Post by GSV3MIaC on Nov 19, 2017 19:19:08 GMT
You have to take the transaction report (for each month) and run it through a program (I used excel/vba) to sum the interest receipts and any cashback (them was the days) .. ignore capital repayments and loan part purchases. If you actually bought or sold loan parts, you need to add/subtract premiums and discounts too. And finally, since it doesn't show up in the transaction reports, you need to adjust for bad debts (which means looking through your parts list for duds, and figuring out when it happened). Of course deciding when to account for the bad debt (and any subsequent recovery) is a judgement call. I just made £200+ profit on an account balance of £0 because a 2016-tax-year bad debt got recovered, which makes the old P&L report a wee bit spiky (and the IRR for this month slightly infinite).
If you want simple, this is not the best platform to try to get the data from!
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bloodycat
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Post by bloodycat on Nov 20, 2017 9:41:06 GMT
I gave up trying to use the reports available from FC as they seem to be designed to be as opaque and confusing as possible.
All I do is check my balance at the end of each month against what my own accounting software says it should be just taking into account any transfers of cash in/out from my bank account. The difference is then just recorded as a monthly gain/loss.
Since I am slowly withdrawing my funds from FC it really isn't worth wasting time and effort on anything more complicated.
Once I have withdrawn the capital I put in I might just leave the remaining received gains in to see how badly the new autobodge system works.
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michaelc
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Post by michaelc on Nov 20, 2017 14:51:25 GMT
Thanks for both replies. Unfortunately, I couldn't find how to add two quote boxes but hopefully this is clear enough.
Bloodycat, that does seem like a good balance between accuracy and easy of setting up but I guess it doesn't work for historical analysis. Also I assume you look at your withdrawable balance every month and not the total balance?
GSV3Miac, this approach seems like it might be the most rigorous but the problem I have is how to determine when a debt goes bad? Even if I, for example, decide I'll consider debts to be written off only when the loan status field of the loan flips to "Bad Debt" I think its hard to understand when that happened? I guess the transactions tell you how much your initial investment into the loan was and what the repayments were and thr loan page does state how much is is left owing so perhaps you calculate using that?
Seems incredible that we have to do this! God knows why FC think its not in their interests to be transparent and provide a simple month by month table or chart showing progress.
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bloodycat
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Post by bloodycat on Nov 20, 2017 16:04:13 GMT
I just use the portfolio total. If you record it each month as you go along it is nice and simple.
If you want to work it out retrospectively it is rather more difficult, especially if you have bought and sold on the SM as you need to account for the interest and fees part of each transaction which, depending on how long you have been investing, is further complicated by the fact they changed the formatting of the entries at some stage.
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Post by GSV3MIaC on Nov 20, 2017 16:50:43 GMT
Determining when a debt goes bad is either 'look at parts each month (or day or whatever) and note when the status changes to something other than 'live', or (if you failed to do that) look at the repayments made tab, which will tell you when the repayments STOPPED being made (although it'll be some arbitrary period after that before FC believes it is dead). It's really a ridiculous amount of effort, especially if you didn't do it from the get-go. I used to have a bot dump everything for me at least monthly, and it was still a PITA because transaction entries never give you part number AND loan number (and for cash-back they gave you NEITHER, iirc), plus of course FC are quite capable of losing or doubling transaction entries (which I had to point out to them several times during my stay with them). I favour SteveT 's approach .. buy/sell the (FC)IT, or else only worry about it on an annual (tax return) basis**. ** and bite your tongue if the numbers don't quite add up right. |
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Post by df on Nov 20, 2017 20:37:30 GMT
I'm trying to find a way to determine how much I have made (or lost) each calendar month over the past year or three. Is this difficult to achieve? So far, I've seen the "tax statement" sort of gives me what I want but its fiddly to select all the dates for each month manually and it isn't very transparent. I've also downloaded the transaction statements for a given month and probably naively summed the total paid-in and paid-out but that didn't seem to give me what I wanted which I think is because a lot of the "money out" was actually new investment which in terms of my overall exposure at FC is a neutral transaction. What do other people do to track their overall gains/losses ? It is a big mission to monitor your monthly gains and losses with FC. They display my "annualised return (after fees and bad debts)" and that's enough for me to know roughly where I am. Yesterday it was 7.7%, today it's 7.9%, used to be more, but overall it is going down due to increasing number of defaults. Since the September change, I don't add or withdraw, just keep it running as it is. If that figure goes below 7% I will start thinking of withdrawing. Any deeper analysis of my funds' performance on FC would bee too much work for what it worth.
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michaelc
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Post by michaelc on Dec 1, 2017 16:31:52 GMT
I knocked up some python software that reads in the transaction csv files (concatenated to get more than one month's processing) and the loan_parts csv file. Decided to open source it in case anyone finds it useful. Note it quite likely contains bugs and also required 10 minutes of messing around getting the files in the right and configuring the app place etc so might only suit someone determined. Code with sample output is here: bitbucket.org/michaelcj/fudingcircleaccounts/overview |
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adrian77
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Post by adrian77 on Dec 1, 2017 17:31:16 GMT
agreed but FC consists of ordinary people doing extraordinary things...
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Post by debaser on Dec 1, 2017 20:24:13 GMT
I use a Google spreadsheet for this. At the end of every month I download the .csv from Funding Circle and paste it into a new sheet, and then I enter the amount the Funding Circle says I have, along with the amount of bad debt that I have, and then it automatically gives me a full breakdown of loans, fees, interest repayments, principle repayments, transfers, and bad debt for each month.
It took me months to get my spreadsheet to where it is now, and it's ridiculous that I have to. Why don't they provide us with a monthly breakdown?
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