External flow Transactions - crucial data that needs curating and more love from Plannr

Understanding external flows in to and out of plans are crucial to being able to report useful and accurate information and time-weighted returns to clients. The underlying transactions inside a plan (buys, sells, equalisation etc) is of less importance from a high-level reporting point of view (and probably much more the domain of the platform and providers).

Having this data accurate and reconciled with the provider, along with having accurate valuation data, is crucial if you want to deliver a client friendly report (either as part of a review or as a periodic performance report) showing the basics like: 1) Balance at start, 2) Amounts contributed, 3) amounts withdrawn, 4) investment growth/decline, 5) Valuation at end. Imo, these should also form part of the new “Valuation report”

I appreciate there is a facility right now to enter this detail inside the “Transactions” section of each plan. There is also the confusing and duplicative “Premiums” section for contributions in to (but not withdrawels from) a plan. It is not fit for purpose for generating reliable reports because: 1) transactions can be generated as part of a schedule, which may not accurately reflect the date or amount of the final transaction, 2) we have no way of knowing whether the trasnasctions are reconciled with the provider’s cash statement.

In order to get to a point where we can generate reliable client reports incorporating external flows, I believe we need the following functionality:

1) The ability to reconcile an external flow transaction with the provider’s cashflow statement - this needs to be something we can do manually if there is no up-to-scratch provider API from Plannr to use

2) For those providers who do have up-to-scratch transaction APIs, be able to have external flows automatically populate on the plan

3) Better labelling of external flow transactions. For example, tax-relief for net pension contributions is not even an option under transactions currently.

I think this can either be implemented as 1) a re-purposing and inprovement of the “Premiums” section - renaming this section to “External flows” and expanding its use for in and outflows in to/out of plans and policies of all types (covering protection, investment bonds, platform accounts, single investments etc); or 2) expanding the functionality inside the Transaction section. I would prefer the former - it keeps external flows seperate, and those who want to go down the granular all-transactions route can knock themselves out in the “Transactions” section.