Spreadsheet Hell

I have an Excel workbook for each of my accounts. In one sheet I record each of my new auction purchases (once they actually draw down); loan ID, rate band, loan size, top rate, my rate, whether it closed early, any CB and some basic categories (property vs SME, etc). Into another sheet I copy and paste a daily extract of my loan parts from the Faintly Credible website. I can then track how old each loan is, when and how much I need to sell, how much has sold, etc. Excel's Autofilter and Sort functions then allow me to look at my loan portfolio through any filters I care to set. Pretty basic but it works for me.

I have LOTS of VBA functions for doing things like extracting loan numbers from the long strings they show up in, matching loan part numbers to loan numbers (that one is a doozy unless you keep on top of it, since Failing Cross-references provide no mapping table, so once you've lost sight of a loan part (eg you sold it, then the loan defaulted) the info has gone too); And cross referencing loan numbers to the loan page ID you need to look at the details (assuming you bid, so you are allowed to see them). Plus I archive information on the parts I bought and sold (since FC won't show you them in 'sold parts' if they have subsequently defaulted), plus lots more (ever changing) scripts to extract usable information from the Flowery Critters transaction reports.

As a result of all this joy I can usually tell them where the errors on my account arise. What I can't do is get them to actually fix them in the master database / transaction ledgers where absolutely every bid and drop out are recorded. Well not yet, anyway.

A lot of information is really hard to reconstruct if you don't record it (stuff like early closes, cashbacks, etc) and the downloadable loan book has got ever less useful over the years, to where I practically stopped bothering.

The horrors have been discussed before (see the thread(s) about account discrepancies) .. however a summary .. .. basically 'stuck bids' where your bid drops out (or the auction is rejected) but the money doesn't get credited back**; double counting loan part sales, sometimes with only partial entries in the transaction log the second time (i.e. you get a credit for the capital, but not the accrued interest, or charged the fee, or whatever), similarly you can be charged for buying a part you never got. In a  couple of cases I have sold 11 loan parts in an loan where the auction data shows I only bought 10 (although all 11 have viable numbers, so I assume a purchase got lost). There are probably (at Mr Lerner says, in his song about the elements) "others which have not yet been discarvvered".

** This was particularly prevalent if you bid in >£20 chunks, since if your bid gets cut down (because it is 'on the edge'), when it finally drops out, the credit got lost (presumably the system went and looked for the original £100 bid, and gave up in disgust when it couldn't find it .. or else it failed to look for the 'last £20 to get knocked out'). This could also happen on 'non round number' auctions, when even a £20 bid can get trimmed to £14, say, before getting thrown out .. the £14 was often then not released back to your account.

FC keep promising to be able to reconcile things properly, but don't seem to have delivered yet (non-delivery is one of their specialities IME).

As you say, very hard to find errors in the reported profit number, since the only way to check that is to add up all the transactions, which we KNOW  are wrong anyway. 8<.

If you don't trust their calculations, I'm not sure what other alternative you'd expect but to go back to the source figures and re-do the calculations.

One file for a year would be nearly 100,000 lines for your account.

I sympathise. I used to have around 6,000 parts. I gave up trying to download the transaction files. It would usually fail to download even one month's file. It appears that one just has to trust Flaky Computing. I put my effort in to challenging the larger scale errors such as double sales.