Sharesight: The Xero add-on for investment portfolios
Imagine this scenario. You’re chasing-down stale spreadsheets and mounds of investor-related paperwork and frantically re-constructing share portfolios in order to sort-out your client’s investment performance and/or tax obligations. Sound familiar? We feel your pain.
Thankfully there’s a better way. Sharesight, with its powerful tax and performance reporting, provides unmatched tracking and insight into investment portfolios. When linked to Xero, it provides a seamless solution between investment portfolio management and accounting. Here’s how:
Automatic portfolio updates
Sharesight simplifies portfolio admin from the very start. That’s because when you import trading histories to Sharesight, corporate actions such as dividends and share splits are automatically incorporated -- going back up to 15 years. Alternatively, you can start with opening balances. Either way, Sharesight automatically adjusts portfolios going forward with daily prices, currency fluctuations, and corporate actions. Having everything always up-to-date, and in one place, allows you to focus on what really matters (tax and/or financial advice), instead of the portfolio data behind it.
Portfolio reconciliation
When you synchronise a Sharesight portfolio to Xero, simply indicate whether you’d like to use bank transactions or invoices. Then map the investment transactions and income in Sharesight with a personalised chart of accounts in Xero. This allows details of share purchases, sales, and dividends to be easily reconciled against bank statements.
When your client makes a trade or when a dividend is paid out, this data will automatically go from Sharesight to Xero. Sharesight will even show you when the data has been sent through successfully -- with the little Xero icon going from grey to blue. We like to think of it as "gamified" portfolio reconciliation.
Taking the Xero integration to the next level, Sharesight can even pull bank account balances, term deposits and cash investments from Xero into Sharesight, so you can view your client’s complete financial position directly within Sharesight -- automatically, and in real-time.
Investment tax reporting
Like Xero, the beauty of Sharesight is that everything lives in one place and can be accessed anytime, and from anywhere. So once a portfolio is loaded into Sharesight, you have instant access to powerful tax reports and performance insights.
From a tax perspective, accountants especially love Sharesight’s Taxable Income and Historical Cost reports, as well as region-specific reports such as Capital Gains Tax (Australia & Canada) and Foreign Investment Fund (New Zealand) reports. Accessible in just a few clicks, these powerful tax reports let accountants focus on forward-looking tax planning discussions instead of always looking backwards and trying to fill the gaps.
Investment performance calculation
Calculating portfolio performance is difficult. With brokerage fees, capital gains, corporate actions and currency fluctuations automatically incorporated, not to mention in-depth performance reports, Sharesight makes it easy to understand how individual holdings and overall portfolios are doing. Taking it a step further, Sharesight lets you benchmark portfolios against popular indices, or leverage Custom Groups to organise investments by a preferred asset allocation methodology -- which trickle-down to Performance, Contribution Analysis and Diversity reports. These insights not only provide peace-of-mind to investors, they’re also the first step to making better investment decisions together.
Portfolio sharing
If your clients are hands-on, they might prefer to sign-up for their own Sharesight account and securely share access with you. Alternatively, you may become a Sharesight professional partner to manage their portfolio on their behalf (and then optionally share access with them). Regardless of whether the portfolio is "owned" by an investor or accountant/advisor, secure access can be granted according to the level of access required: read-only, read/write, or admin. So rather than emailing sensitive documents back and forth, or printing-out and forwarding reports, Sharesight provides investors and their accountants/advisors with everything they need to conduct forward-looking, performance and tax planning discussions -- not just at tax-time, but throughout the year.
Sharesight is seamless portfolio management and accounting
Connecting Sharesight to Xero automates and organises portfolio data, and makes it accessible from anywhere, at any time. This gives investors peace of mind knowing exactly how their portfolio is performing, and that they won’t be scrambling (or face any surprises) at tax time. And Sharesight empowers accountants and financial advisers to focus on building strong professional relationships instead of always paper-chasing and looking backwards.
Sign up to Sharesight's professional plan today and start enjoying the benefits of managing client portfolios with Sharesight.
FURTHER READING
Announcing the Sharesight Fintech Scholarship's 2024 winner
We are pleased to announce the 2024 winner of the Sharesight Fintech Scholarship, Temiremi Egwuenu, who is studying Applied Finance at Macquarie University.
Effortlessly track clients’ trades with Sharesight and Desktop Broker
Sharesight has integrated with Desktop Broker, allowing advisers to have their clients’ trading data automatically synced to Sharesight’s portfolio tracker.
Red flags: When should you avoid investing in an asset?
This article explores some of the “red flags” you should look out for when considering an investment for your portfolio.