MProfit Review: A Free Portfolio Management App

I’ve been investing in the stock market for a long long time now, and in the early days, kept a written record and then used Excel or Open Office Calc to track my stock portfolio and other investments. Over a period of time, as the portfolio grew, it became cumbersome to keep inputting the data manually whenever there were any changes, and that’s where MProfit Portfolio Management Software came in handy.

Till recently I’ve been using Microsoft Money to do this, along with the ET Portfolio Tracker for stocks and Value Research for mutual funds. There are portfolio tools with demat and online trading providers too. I use Sharekhan, HDFC Securities and ICICIDirect, and am not too enthused about their portfolio trackers. Besides, they will only track my investments done through them.

MS Money is perfect in many ways for me; lets me track my investments, bank accounts, loans, pending bills, credit cards – all in one place, and I’ve been using it for almost 10-15 years now. However, the biggest problem was no real time updates for Indian stocks, no Capital Gains working for India (so had to use Excel) and no way to have a “Group Account”, like for a family. There is also no way to import data *easily and accurately*. Microsoft has discontinued this product, but that doesn’t impact my usage in any way, as there is a recent free version still available for download.

The ET Portfolio Tracker is quite comprehensive and is easily among the best ones I’ve seen so far (and free). The only minor issue is it is web based, not that there’s any bank or other critical information stored (like Intuit Money Manager ). It’s not such a huge deal breaker though I’d be wary of entering too many details. Portfolio management on Value Research is superb for mutual funds, but not all that great for stocks.

A year ago, I’d tried MProfit Portfolio Management Software – it was then available on a trial basis, after which one had to pay. I liked it, but wasn’t sure about paying for something that MS Money and the ET Tracker were doing for free. Some months ago however, it was made available for free for investors (for total investments upto Rs.50 lakhs) and I downloaded it again.

It is desktop based and all data is stored locally. Market data is updated real time to the extent allowed (with the standard 15 minute delay). There isn’t much to configure and once that was done, I went about adding data. The opening screen has a list of investment types on the left, from which one can select the required type and input the details. It is fairly straightforward and I liked the fact that one could input details according to the contract note, which took into account all associated costs with purchase/sale.

However, the real powerhouse is the import function, which lets you add a template for Broker Contract Note, Mutual Funds, Insurance and F&O, taking the hassle out of inputting the data at all. It includes almost every known intermediary in the market today so you shouldn’t have a problem importing your data irrespective of who you’ve invested with, including PDFs from eCAS (for mutual funds).

Once the template is created, the scrip/MF names in the contract note/bill need to be mapped to the names in MProfit the first time and voila, all your data is in. I was wary of doing it correctly for all my previous transactions, but it checks for duplicates, so no worries about entering same data twice. The only problem I faced was in importing slightly older records, as it recognises only the latest / recent template.

For other corporate actions like merger/demerger, split, bonus, dividend payout/reinvestment, adding the details is straightforward, but has to be done manually, which I found the biggest pain while using MProfit. This is unlike the ET tracker or Value Research, which show these as pending actions and once you give the go-ahead, automatically update the portfolio to reflect the changed status.

The report generation feature in MProfit is quite good and comprehensive, with six major types of reports, each having a further 10-15 sub-reports, though I’ve not yet checked out all of them. The data is presented in a nice and neat format and it was fun playing around with the data to generate different reports, particularly for Capital Gains.

They don’t have an app yet*, but then I don’t trade daily and I don’t need to check my portfolio every few hours of the day either, so I don’t really miss that aspect. While this is a free version, they also have a Investor+ version with unlimited investments, Pro version for Companies, HNIs, NRIs etc and an Advisor version for CFPs, Investment Advisors and brokers. Check latest pricing here.

You can sign up for the free version from the MProfit site, use it and then take a call on whether to continue using it or upgrade to the paid version. Do note that the free version will work only for investments up to Rs. 50L. They also seem quite keen to move their users from using the desktop version to the online version – which may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

* Update: They’ve released apps on both Android and iOS, which you can download.