How to keep track of all your mutual fund investments

Over the past 15 years, Shruti Sinha has invested in mutual funds with the help of two banks and a friend, who happens to be a financial adviser. Occasionally, she has used her own judgement to invest in schemes that she has found too good to let go. Now, Sinha is struggling to keep track of all the schemes in which she has invested and is even having a hard time recalling some of her early investments. How can she take control of her mutual fund investments?

Sinha can take comfort in the fact that the know your customer ( KYC) norms have made it easier to track long-forgotten investments. Her mutual fund investments are linked to her permanent account number (PAN) and she can access her entire investment history by requesting account statements from fund houses. All she needs to do is to recall the fund houses through which she invested. She can visit a nearby investment service centre, provide her PAN and proof of identity, and seek printouts of her investments.

Sinha can then create an MS Excel worksheet with six columns. The first is for folio number; the second, for the name of scheme; the third, for investment date; the fourth, for sum invested/returns (differentiate purchase from redemption by using a minus sign); the fifth is for the purchase price, and the last column is for the current value of the scheme. In one sheet, she will have all the details needed to keep track of her investments. She can update this record sheet every time she makes a transaction.

In order to evaluate her portfolio, Sinha can simply add up the figures in column six, which represents the current value of her investments. She can place this value at the end of column four, which shows the value of transactions. She should put in the date of valuation in column three. Now, if she uses a formula called "xirr" and selects columns three and four, she will know the return on her portfolio. Sinha can manage her investments and keep a proper record if she can bring them to one file. After an initial effort, she’ll find she is in perfect control.

The content on this page is courtesy Centre for Investment Education and Learning (CIEL). Contributions by Girija Gadre, Arti Bhargava and Labdhi Mehta.