Monthly Statements

Each month, the Treasurer prepares a statement for the members of the club and a valuation for this month's Loot Lizards share price. The Loot Lizards statements are drawn from the NAIC software, and are then massaged to remove inaccuracies and to add some additional data to them.

The NAIC accounting software has a bunch of bugs and things that the members and Treasurer dislike about it. However, we've been using it since the early days of the club, and there doesn't appear to be anything better than it at the moment, so we're basically stuck with it. To make the output more livable, we run 4 reports each month to a file, and then parse the results, to generate our final monthly statements. We run Individual Valuation Statements, the Club Valuation Statement, the Member Status Report, and the invesment history, including the valuations to get the major report.

Annualized Rates of Gain

The major thing we delete from these reports is the annualized rates of gain. These rates of gain mostly make sense if you take into account the date the report was generated, the last date we archived data from the software, the phase of the moon and the alignment of the planets. Unfortunately, what the Loot Lizards expect to see here is an annualized rate of gain over the life of the investment. We just strip these out completely because the information they give is misleading at best. (We've actually seen it dead wrong a couple times.) The times we used the date the club started were the most satisfactory from the standpoint of annualized rates of gain; however, this had unpleasant side effects for the member's status report. (At some point, we'll calculate these based on share price and put them back in. Current parse scripts are in awk which doesn't support exponents.)

Valuation Statements

The valuation statements take the bulk of the massaging. The major differences are:

Inclusion of Dividend Data - We add dividend data into the valuation statement by parsing the investment history report. When evaluating performance, it's nice to know this.
Correction of the Purchase Date - Stocks we purchased prior to the last time we archived data out of the database show up with a purchase date of the archive date. We often use these dates when making sell or keep decisions; we need them to reflect reality, not archive history.
Combination of Total Lines - Many total and subtotal lines were spread over two or three lines. By combining them, we make the valuation statement so it fits on a single page and leaves room for the member status report.
Deletion of Useless Data - There's a lot of information produced at the end of this report that nobody ever really uses, like how many shares $10 will buy.
Highlighting Useful Data - We take the two pieces of data that everyone looks at (how much we can spend and how much a share costs) and make them a lot easier to see. (This has cut down the number of times the Treasurer gets asked for them to 3 or 4 times meeting! For a long time, it was literally every 3-5 minutes during the course of a meeting)
Reformatting of Price/Share Data - In the original report, pretty much all numbers have 6 decimal places. We cut prices down to three and share counts down to 4. This makes the reports a lot easier to read.
Delete annualized gain columns

Member Status Statements

Delete annualized gain columns

Reformatting of Price/Share Data - In the original report, pretty much all numbers have 6 decimal places.

Individual Valuation Statements

This is one location where we don't bother stripping the compounded gain rates.

Reformatting of Price/Share Data - In the original report, pretty much all numbers have 6 decimal places. (This was just annoying.)

Price Tables

You'd think that being able to get a table of stock prices by date adjusted for splits would be a fairly basic function of the NAIC accounting software. You'd be wrong. In order to get the prices table, we have to parse the investment history report, look for splits, and adjust prices prior to the split accordingly, then output it in table format. This is a pain in the butt to build.