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Easy, Automatic Portfolio Tracking with SimpleMoney

This guest post is written by Pranshu Maheshwari of SimpleMoney, a  Chennai-based fintech startup.He explains his product offering:

If you invest in direct mutual funds or are considering it, chances are, you have been overwhelmed by keeping track of all of your funds across multiple fund houses and portals.

If you have tried your hand at portfolio tracking, you probably know how exhausting and time consuming it can be. You have probably spent long hours in front of an Excel spreadsheet updating your information, or have manually uploaded your information to portals on an all too regular basis.

One option to overcome this could be logging in directly to the fund house’s website, but if you invest in different funds, this can be time consuming. With greater awareness of the benefits of investing in mutual funds directly, more of us are now investing across different platforms. Keeping track of all of this can be very difficult.

This is a shame, because mutual funds are actually great investment tools, but it’s possible that some of you might be discouraged from investing directly because of how difficult it can be to keep track of everything. The benefit of saving you 1-2% by investing in direct (rather than regular) funds would be outweighed by the hassle of all this manual tracking!

I tried to figure out if there could be an easier way of doing all this, which is when I built SimpleMoney, a tool that tracks your portfolio by reading the investment statements in your inbox, eliminating the need for data entry or uploading of information.

All you need to do is login, and your portfolio will be loaded automatically. New investments and transactions are added automatically too.

With SimpleMoney, you can see the performance of your portfolio with just a couple of clicks. SimpleMoney calculates metrics like absolute change and XIRR for all your investments. XIRR is an important value that will help you compare the performance of different information and help you evaluate your returns.

You can see this data for individual funds, by asset class, or by type of fund. You can also compare your returns against the market using our proprietary algorithm, CorrectCompare™.

SimpleMoney calculates all these metrics over various time periods, from the last one day to the last five years. I personally find this useful to figure out whether my funds are underperforming against the market, and I have been able to move out of bad investments quickly.

If you invest on behalf of your family members, you can track investments from multiple email IDs on SimpleMoney, and categorize them into subfolios by using the PAN number, folio number or name.

SimpleMoney also shows you all the capital gains taxes for your investments, allowing you to automatically calculate your advance tax liability.

SimpleMoney is free, and it takes just ten seconds of work to track your entire portfolio – we’d love for you to try it out and let us know what you think!

If you have any questions, please get in touch at support@simplemoney.in, and we’ll be happy to answer.

Happy investing!

9 replies on “Easy, Automatic Portfolio Tracking with SimpleMoney”

By creating an account you are giving an access to read all the emails from your mailbox.

I would highly not recommend that.

Hi there,

this is Sindhuri here, and I am a member of the SimpleMoney team!

@Sachin S: certainly, I can give you a brief summary of how Perfios and SimpleMoney are different. In fact, we used to use Perfios ourselves, until we started thinking of ways to develop a completely automated process for portfolio tracking. SimpleMoney is fully automatic, whereas Perfios requires banking usernames/passwords or requires you to upload statements manually.

Perfios also uses Flash, which means that it is not convenient for mobile use, and Flash usage across the board is decreasing today because of high data privacy breaches.

With Perfios, a user can track bank accounts, stocks, and other financial instruments. SimpleMoney only tracks mutual funds today, but we are launching stocks soon!

@Jasraj Singh – I completely understand your reservation about providing email access, especially in today’s age when we hear of a lot of data breaches. It is certainly scary! The reason we use this method is because it is frankly the easiest (and right now, only) way
we can think of to ensure complete automation and zero manual uploads. SimpleMoney’s AI only reads emails that are related to investments (from specified senders), and we have open sourced that part of the code to ensure full transparency. You can find it here:
https://gist.github.com/maheshwarip/208b60fea920ccd768bd2ebfdbef296f

One way to allay your fears and concerns could be to create a dedicated email account just for your investments. If you want to read more about how to change email IDs associated with your mutual funds, you can read our blog post here: https://blog.simplemoney.in/how-to-change-the-email-id-associated-with-your-mutual-funds-3f256750b613

We hope this is useful! Please email support@simplemoney.in with any questions and we’ll get right back to you!

@Sindhuri,

Let me tell you my case I have 4 Demat accounts and 8 folios under different mutual fund schemes.
On top of this there are 2 Demat accounts and 4 folios which are under my family name and I take care of them also.

Basically you are suggesting me that I should change my email address at 18 places.

You really think that it is viable.

Waiting for your reply

@Jasraj, I certainly understand the difficulty associated with changing the email address at 18 different places.

While most of them are over the phone, it still does add up. I understand your reservations about this. One other option that we provide to users that takes a little bit more manual involvement, is giving them the option of auto-forwarding their investment related emails to a dedicated email ID. I am including the instructions below in case you might be interested. Please email support@simplemoney.in if you want more information or have any questions.

Forwarding Investment-Related email
1) Create a new gmail ID
2) Open your existing inbox in which you receive the statements currently. Go to settings, and click on “Forwarding and POP/IMAP”. Then, click on “Add a forwarding address”. Add the new email ID that you just created.
3) When the ID has been added, go back to the inbox in which you currently receive the statements. Click on the small arrow in the search box to open the advanced search page.
4) in the “From” field when you click on the advanced search button, paste the following, including the curly braces:

{cams camsonline karvy sundarammutual service@franklintempleton nsdl cdslstatement principalindia quantumamc edelweissfin nse bse zerodha}

This will pick up statements from all the AMCs, as well as demat account statements from NSDL/CDSL for stock tracking. The BSE/NSE statements are for stock tracking too.

After you login with the new ID, it’ll say that there are no investments for the account, but that’s okay. Once you’ve signed in with the new ID, let me know. We’ll trigger a CAMS statement for the old ID, which will get forwarded to the new one, and then the data will be added in.

Does it also tracks stock portfolio? From multiple brokers – say, Zerodha, icicidirect, mosl?

Or only mutual funds?

I would be interested to have direct equity portfolio tracker to calculate XIRR,

Pl inform me to my personal email ID also

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