Investing Activity Report -- improvements
The Investing Activity Report is a nice report that is at lease close to what multiple financial institutions present as an overview with a regular statement. The report includes such items as Beginning Value, Net Deposits/Withdrawals, various Incomes, Market Value Change, and Ending values.
As is, the report is built for and defaults to quarterly data for a user selected time frame. Other than the overall time frame, the user has no control over the columns.
Two suggestion to broaden the value of the report:
- I suggest other time periods be available as is the case with the "Portfolio Value & Cost Basis Report". The typical FI statement I have seen presents the values for the most recent period (quarterly or monthly) and YTD totals. While I see no particular need to go shorter than monthly, to be consistent with other reporting the broader scope of interval periods is probably a good idea.
- I suggest offering columns by Account would also be valuable. As is, one can specify to include multiple accounts, but they are always lumped together. There is not ability to see the individual account contributions that make up the total. So if one wanted to see the same style of report for multiple accounts, they need to select one account at a time and get reports individually for each account. Under this selection, only the totals for the selected period would be presented; not the quarterly breakdown. Some users might be interested in "by security" columns, but I would not find that necessary.
To summarize these two ideas into one, broad the scope of the report such that columns are more flexible paralleling the Column selection for the Banking Summary report that includes columns for time periods or accounts (or other selections). I believe this would enhance the value of this basic report.