CMC clients will be spared the task of having to manually enter all their historic trades when setting up their Sharesight portfolio and any future share trades will be automatically synchronised to Sharesight. Best of all, customers with small portfolios will be able to take advantage of Sharesight’s new free plan to manage their portfolio in Sharesight at no cost. Our standard Investor and Expert plans will also be available to customers who require the additional functionality.

The CMC partnership is another significant step towards our ultimate goal which is to make life easier for investors by fully automating the administration and management of investment portfolios.

We are working hard to ensure similar functionality is available to all share market investors. We are in discussions with a number of other brokers about providing similar functionality and our ultimate goal is to provide seamless connections to all brokers in Australia and NZ. Feel free to let your favourite broker know that you would like them to implement this service as well!

How do I connect my account to CMC?

If you are a CMC client this functionality will be rolled out over the next month. CMC will host a dedicated page on their site which will provide customers with the opportunity to create a new Sharesight account or link an existing account. Transactions will then be automatically recorded in Sharesight as soon as a trade is completed in the CMC system.

Our press release and related press coverage can be found here.

With that aim in mind we have developed an exciting new feature that will automate the recording of your buy and sell trades into your Sharesight portfolio. This will save you the hassle of having to manually record new trades into your Sharesight portfolio each time you buy and sell.

How does this work?

Sharesight provides you with a unique email address and you instruct your Broker to send a copy of each of your contract notes to this address.

Each time we receive a copy of the contract note from your broker, Sharesight will automatically create a trade in your portfolio. The trade will contain a comment to indicate it was created from a contact note sent via email. Emails are typically processed in around 10 minutes. As soon as the trade has been processed you will receive a confirmation email from Sharesight containing a link to the newly created trade.

We urge you to try this new feature because the more contract notes we receive the more brokers we will be able to cover and the more comprehensive and reliable the system will become.

Processing PDF files can be a tricky business so we’ll be fine tuning things as we go along to increase accuracy and reliability. The more contract notes you send us the better the system will become. Please use our community forum to let us know if you run into any issues.
  
Here’s how to get started.
 
Step 1 – Make a note of the email address for your portfolio.
To view the email address for your portfolio, you must enable the broker email import function. To do this, first click the ‘settings’ link and then click the ‘edit settings’ button below the appropriate portfolio. Look for the section titled ‘Broker Email Import’ and click the ‘enable’ button. Once enabled, the email address for your portfolio will be displayed. This is the email address where you will send your PDF contract notes for processing.
 
Step 2 – Check that we currently support your broker.
We maintain an up-to-date list of supported brokers here. If your broker is not on the list, ask us to support your broker by submitting an ‘idea’ to the community forum. If someone else has already suggested that we add your broker, please click the +1 button to add you vote. This will allow us to prioritise support for additional brokers.
 
Step 3 – Send through your contract notes
Because this feature is new we suggest that you manually forward through your first few contract notes before setting things up with your broker. To do this simply forward your contract note email to the email address generated in Step 1, ensuring that the name of the broker (as per our list of supported brokers) is in the subject line of the email.
 
You will receive an email confirming whether or not the contract note was successfully processed. Please allow 10 minutes or so for the processing to complete. You can view the current status of your email by clicking on the ‘view contract notes’ button (under Settings >> General >> Edit Settings).
 
Once you have confirmed that your contract notes are able to be processed successfully, you can instruct you broker to send a copy of your future contract notes to the email address generated in step 1.
 
Full help documentation is available here.
 
As always, we look forward to your feedback to help us make Sharesight even better for you.

There are no hidden catches with this offer – free means free! And what’s more, Sharesight has added functionality. Sharesight Free offers much more than our previous Starter plan which cost $5 per month and was restricted to only 5 shareholdings.

Sharesight Free includes access to a range of great functionality previously only to our premium plan customers, including:

• Performance report
• Sold securities report
• Taxable income report
• Historical cost report
• CGT report

And you also get access to our new contract notes processing service which allows you to have all your buy and sell trades automatically recorded in your Sharesight portfolio for you. To learn more about this exciting feature check out our tour page or view our full help documentation

As share portfolios grow, the administrative burden of maintaining a share portfolio – the record keeping, compiling tax returns and accounting information – becomes a serious problem and so automating these tasks in one of Sharesight’s premium plans is unbeatable value for money. For larger portfolios, calculating the true, annualised return on shares (individually and on the total portfolio) becomes an even more daunting task without Sharesight – and you need this information to make well-informed investment decisions.

Please click here to view the full details of our new pricing plans.

Andrew is the former chief executive officer of Morningstar Australia and he has joined with us as a major shareholder. Andrew will also be actively involved in managing Sharesight’s Australian operations.

Andrew shares our vision for creating a revolutionary cloud-based portfolio management platform. The skills and experience he has gained at the highest level in the Australian financial services industry mean that his help in developing and marketing Sharesight in Australia will be a huge asset to the company.

Further details are set out below in our Australian press release:

SYDNEY, 1 June 2011: Innovative portfolio management service Sharesight today announced the appointment of Mr Andrew Bird as Executive Director.

The company also announced today that it has closed a second round investment from an investor group led by Mr Bird.

Mr Bird is the former Chief Executive Officer of Morningstar Australia.

He joins New Zealand –based Sharesight as the company prepares to actively promote its online share portfolio management system to Australian sharemarket investors and their advisers.

Company founder Mr Tony Ryburn welcomed Mr Bird’s appointment:

“Sharesight is an investor-centric service founded on the principle of creating a better way to administer stock portfolios and dramatically cut costs by harnessing smart technology. Andrew’s background leading highly-regarded financial services companies in Australia fits well with this guiding principle.

“The Sharesight board and investors look forward to Andrew’s input as we bring our unique software as a service offer to the attention of a larger number of sharemarket investors in Australia and abroad,” he said.

Mr Bird said the Sharesight service held a unique ‘sweet spot’ in the Australian market, as its combination of new technology, low cost and high functionality was a welcome innovation.

”I have felt for a long time there was a need for a high quality, highly functional portfolio administration tool that is cost effective for SMSF and self-directed investors,” Mr Bird said.

“The Sharesight tool really hits the mark: it provides accurate and detailed performance information, automates most of the paperwork involved in a portfolio and provides easy to use income and CGT reporting.

“The Sharesight service impressed me straight away with its focus on 100% web based functionality and its integration with other cloud computing platforms like Xero accounting. This combination is a significant advance on most services available to self-directed and SMSF investors today.”

Mr Bird was previously the co-founder of Aspect Huntley, an investments information and research business that was acquired by Morningstar Inc. (NASDAQ: MORN) in 2006. Following the acquisition, he served as CEO of Morningstar Australia and New Zealand until 2010, when he resigned to focus full time on private investment opportunities.

This allows you to create your own set of labels and apply them to shares in your portfolio. It is then possible to report on specific categories of shares within a portfolio based on the labels that you have defined.

Labels can be anything you like and you can apply more than one label to each share. For example, you may choose to label your shares based on which broker or advisor recommended them and also label them based on investment profile (eg income vs growth).

The performance report can be filtered to include only shares that match the label(s) you specify. For example you could separately compare the performance of shares recommended by Broker A vs those recommended by Broker B.

We would be interested to hear how you use labels to categorise your shares and which other reports you would like to be able to filter. Send us your feedback or post a comment below.

We know that for many of our customers being adequately diversified is an important part of their investment strategy. To help you do this we have developed a Portfolio Diversity report that provides a detailed breakdown of your investments by industry classification, investment type (shares, options, funds etc), market, and country, along with a graphical view in the form of a pie chart.

Our Australian customers will find this report invaluable for meeting their SMSF reporting requirements.

As with all reports, you can run the Diversity report based on any date and export all of the data into an Excel spreadsheet.

Better yet, this new functionality is available to all Sharesight customers at no cost – your subscription stays the same.

International Shares

Sharesight now supports shares on the New York (NYSE), NASDAQ, and London (LSE) stock exchanges. You can now add these shares into your portfolio just as you would for an ASX or NZX share. Simply choose the appropriate exchange from the drop down list when adding a new share.

Create and Maintain your own Instruments

To record an unlisted instrument or one that is listed on an exchange that Sharesight does not currently support, select 'OTHER' in the 'Market' drop down box. To create a new instrument on the 'OTHER' market, ensure that the 'Add New?' tick box is selected.

Once you have added a share on the 'OTHER' market you can manually record dividends and trades against it just like any other share in Sharesight.

To get up-to-date performance information all you need to do is enter the latest price. Simply go to the detail page and click ‘enter a price’ in the right hand sidebar. Click ‘show prices’ to view or edit historical prices.

The 'Show Prices' page allows you to enter new prices and modify existing prices (simply click on the prices to edit them). This page also contains an 'Upload Bulk Prices' function which allows you to import a CSV file containing share prices (such as the historic price files that can be obtained via the Google finance or Yahoo finance websites).

Last year I was a fourth year Software Engineering student studying a Bachelor of Information Technology at Victoria University of Wellington. My commercial software development experience came from being the Summer of Code intern at Xero during the summer of 2008/2009. The experiences learnt there and in previous jobs helped in quickly becoming a productive member of the Sharesight team. Most of my development experience had been more desktop oriented software with Java and C#/.NET, so being dropped into the world of Ruby and Ruby on Rails was quite a bit of an eye opener and I had to quickly get an understanding of how to use it appropriately.

The Wellington Summer of Code is an internship program started by John Clegg to match ICT students around Wellington with ICT companies around Wellington. This year was the fourth year it has been run and it has grown to well over a hundred students vying for positions at over twenty companies from small startups to large corporate and government organisations. Each internship is around twelve weeks of full time work covering various aspects of ICT.

At Sharesight, I worked on the development of a few new features that will make life easier and less stressful for the Sharesight customers. Here’s an overview of what I worked on and some of the experiences I had while in the middle of it all.

Contract note email importer

The Contract Note Email Importer is a new feature of Sharesight that will eliminate the need to record new shares as you buy and sell. This feature works by taking the PDF contract note emails that you receive from your broker once a trade is completed, and automatically extracts the relevant trade data and records it into your Sharesight portfolio. Development of this feature was really interesting as we had to work with processes that already existed, while keeping any extra steps as close to zero as possible. The process of this development also exposed me to a somewhat different way of doing things than I had experienced in the past.

Some of the interesting problems encountered included finding and creating a way to give as much feedback as possible to the customer should something not work during the processing of the contract note. For example, if the processing failed due to the contract note selling more shares then we knew were owned, then we could tell the customer exactly why the processing failed. On the other end, the processing may have failed for a reason that could not be easily defined so we would have to send a much broader email with several things to check. We also had to build it in a way that new messages could easily and quickly be added in the future.

The contract note email import function is currently undergoing the final stage of user testing and is available to members of the Sharesight Beta Group.

Trades report and trade export function

One of the things that we have had many customer requests for at Sharesight is the ability to export all the trades that a customer has entered. The second project I worked on helps solve this issue, giving each customer the ability to export their data from Sharesight should they feel they need to. This was an interesting project that required me to look at the problem from the customer’s perspective. This meant going through each step while thinking of the ways a customer would look at the information, links, buttons, etc. and build the report in a way that would be clear, easy and quick to use.

During the development of the trades report, we researched the import/export formats of other related systems to ensure that the format we used in the trades report was broadly compatible with other similar systems.

This morning we made the Trades report available to all Sharesight customers.

Conclusion

The internship has been an interesting and good learning experience. I have learnt a lot about the development of good, solid web based software solutions. You may even see another blog post from me in the future, as I have been taken on as a full time developer for Sharesight.

The Excel sheets contain formulas to calculate totals where appropriate so this will make it really easy to add new rows into the spreadsheets if you need to.

The Excel export files are compatible with the following versions of Microsoft Excel:

• Excel XP, 2003 and 2007 for Windows
• Excel 2004 or 2008 for Mac OS X

Thanks to our beta group customers for the testing and feedback.

We have started on our list of improvements by fixing problems that many of you reported with the ‘remember me’ function. ‘Remember me’ will now work across multiple computers and we have increased the time that ‘remember me’ stays active so that it will still work even if you haven’t accessed Sharesight for a while.

Here are some tips on how to use the ‘remember me’ function:

1. If you don’t want to have to type your email and password each time you access Sharesight, click the ’remember me’ tick-box on the login page. Please note that this will allow anyone who has access to your computer to view your portfolio without a password, so if other people have access to your computer you might not want to use the ‘remember me’ function.

2. When you have finished using Sharesight simply close your browser. Do not click the logout link – see below.

3. If you don’t want to use the ‘remember me’ function anymore, access your Sharesight account and click the ‘logout’ link in the top right corner of the screen. This will clear your ‘remember me’ status on all computers that you have used to access Sharesight.