Best practice for tracking/reporting investment expenses

Keith Free Ellis

How do you all view investment expense data? Looking for some ideas to improve upon my current method described below.

When holdings have fees, I record two transactions: 1) shares sold to fund the fee and 2) the misc expense, currently uncategorized. I could go back and assign a category and create a transaction report to group by security, but I'm ideally looking for a column to add to the portfolio view or one of the stock reports (portfolio activity, portfolio perf) to show this. 

Thanks!

NotACPA

Keith,When you use the Misc Expense transaction, why don't you use the Category field?

q_lurker

I run with an Invest Exp category that I use for these potentially deductible fees.  Why would you choose not to categorize them?  

There is no way I know of to present these in a portfolio view.  These fees would be part of the 'return' for an Investment performance report and thus also factor in for the portfolio views Average Annual Return calculations.  

The more common way to present these numbers would be in a spending or transaction type report subtotaled by category.