Think back with us, about a decade or so.
Back then, there were very few tools purpose-built to make DIY investing accessible.
And there was certainly a lack of platforms explicitly meant to help investors manage and grow their own portfolios.
For a long time, the biggest player was Google Finance, which had a laser focus on stocks and in recent years has lost some of the capabilities that inventors flocked to.
While we’ll always be thankful for solutions like this that paved the way for personal finance software, we’re also happy that we’re now about to move beyond them.
If you’re still working with spreadsheets and calculators and manual processes, it’s time you welcomed in the new era of the automated financial dashboard. And we’ll show you how to do just that, step-by-step, right after we dive into the reasons creating your own investment dashboard is pivotal to your wealth heath.
What is an Investment Dashboard?
For the purposes of this article, we’ll define an investment dashboard as a digital tool, usually a web and/or mobile app, for tracking and managing investments.
The goal of an investment dashboard is ultimately to help you organize, improve, and hopefully even add automation to the process of investing.
Many investment dashboard tools are accessible to digital investors, as well as wealth management personnel they may work with. Organizations that sell personalized planning services often offer simple investment dashboards to engage users. Other offerings, like the one we’ll walk you through later, are free-standing.
Why to Build a Dashboard for Your Investment Portfolio
Sounds nice and all, but what makes an investment dashboard a must-have?
There are a handful of reasons it’s critical for the modern, hands-on investor to use one.
Get a Visualization of Your Financial Life and Portfolio Performance
A key goal of an investment dashboard is to make your every investment, account, and other asset type visible and accessible.
Why does this matter?
It provides insight into how your assets play together to impact your net worth. One asset bringing down your overall progress? You’ll be able to spot it and swap it out when you have a transparent view of your portfolio.
Set More Accurate Goals and Forecasts
A clear viewpoint of your investments and assets is key to understanding individual and overall asset performance.
With a realistic understanding of performance across the board, you’ll be prepared to create more accurate reports, build out forecasts, and set achievable future goals and timelines.
Understand and Improve Your Portfolio’s Diversification
The process of investing in a variety of assets from different classes is called portfolio diversification.
Diversification has become a necessity for the modern portfolio because it’s been shown to decrease risk and increase returns over time.
How does diversification do this?
Asset classes that are uncorrelated with each other don’t experience losses, or gains, at the same time. So when you’re diversified into uncorrelated assets, it’s harder to permanently lose capital. Of course, it also dampens gains to some extent. But, as we mentioned, over time a balanced portfolio wins out over a high-growth, high-risk portfolio.
Diversification is easier than ever today now that digital assets are available to the public. However, it’s also making portfolio management complex.
Complex portfolio or not, it’s finally time to discuss how to build out a dashboard for tracking all the assets within it — using Kubera.
Tutorial: How to Create Your Own Investment Dashboard Using Kubera
Kubera is modern, custom-built personal balance sheet software.
Here’s how to set up Kubera to create an investing dashboard that can help you visualize how each asset is impacting your net worth performance, use your financial data to set accurate goals, and pursue a more balanced and diverse portfolio.
1. Round Up and Connect All Accounts and Assets to Kubera
First things first, it’s time to account for all the assets and liabilities that make up your portfolio and impact your net worth. Assets are things you own, such as cash, bank and stock accounts, real estate, vehicles, valuables, cryptocurrencies, and so on. Liabilities are things you owe, such as vehicle and student loans, mortgages, credit card debt, etc.
This is the only point in this process where we’ll encourage you to bust out the pencil and paper if it’s useful. What you want to do is rack your brain to track down everything you own and you owe. It might be a little painful, a bit surprising, and definitely time consuming. That’s OK! Thanks to Kubera’s automation and ease of use, it’s only going to get better from here.
With your list laid out, it’s time to sign up for Kubera! There’s practically no learning curve, so you’ll be able to start entering your assets and liabilities into our spreadsheet-like interface in no time.
We built Kubera on several different financial aggregators, so our platform can connect with and track nearly any banking, brokerage, crypto, or other account you throw at it. In fact, you can see our living list of just some of these accounts and institutions here. Once connected, the balance of these accounts will automatically remain up to date on your dashboard.
For assets that don’t have an active account attached to them — think collectibles, heirlooms, cash purchases, etc. — it’s also easy to enter all their details into Kubera. Just like that, you’ll be able to see their value and their impact on your portfolio and net worth right alongside the rest of your assets.
And, with that, you’ve pretty much built out your own investment dashboard. However, there are a few more features that Kubera has that we want you to know about to enrich your experience.
2. Set Your Preferred Currency
Next up, you’ll want to choose the preferred currency in which you’ll like to see your portfolio displayed.
We built Kubera for global investors just like us! So we made it easy to track assets that are measured in foreign currency. Just enter your assets with any currency code (USD 100, EUR 100, INR 100, etc.) and Kubera will automatically convert their value into the preferred currency you’ve chosen.
However, if you do want to track assets in multiple currencies, you can by setting up multiple portfolios within your Kubera account. Find more details at this guide to using our multi-currency portfolio tracker.
We won’t get bogged down in those details right now, because instead we want to show you how to use your new portfolio manager to find the return on those investments you’re so carefully tracking!
3. Automatically Identify Return on Various Investments
As mentioned, a diverse portfolio is a healthy one — but it’s also a complex one when it comes to understanding how each asset is doing on the returns front.
So, we made it less complex with our automatic internal rate of return calculator (IRR is a detailed version of ROI that includes cash flow and holding time.)
All you have to do to take advantage of this feature is make sure an asset’s details are up to date: purchase price, current value, and cash flow into or out of the asset. Kubera will add the holding time that the asset has been in your portfolio and, boom, you’ve got an IRR percentage! And, of course, it displays in your preference currency just like everything else inside Kubera.
In addition, Kubera even displays how certain popular indices and cryptos are doing, so you have an easy benchmark against which to measure your asset performance. This feature can help you make quick yet informed decisions on which assets to hold and which to divest away from, so you can move toward your financial goals.
To learn more about how Kubera quickly calculates IRR, complete with an example, check out this help center article.
Now, let’s round out our exploration of Kubera’s main portfolio management features with its visualization capabilities.
4. View Asset Allocation and Track Net Worth in Real-Time
Employing beautifully designed charts, graphs, and a number-crunching recap view, Kubera provides a detailed view of asset allocation, asset performance, and net worth change over time.
This is the capstone of a modern investment dashboard that gives you all the information you need to meet your financial goals. But we’re not done just yet — it’s time to share your portfolio for education and wealth protection purposes.
5. Share Your Investment Portfolio
We’ve built a unique workflow into Kubera to allow you to save and share your investment portfolio with posterity. The first element is the “safe deposit box” where you can store financial information and supporting documents. Then, the beneficiary management feature allows users to choose someone who will get access to their portfolio once they’re no longer able to manage it.
In addition, you can also share a read-only link to your portfolio with anyone. Set up a password, assign an expiration date, and even mask certain numbers to cater the experience for whomever you’re sharing with.
If you want to use Kubera with help from your financial advisor or wealth manager, there’s no better way than to share our white-label-ready client portal solution with them. You get the benefit of their unfettered access to your assets, and they get to switch to a modern solution that will improve their workflows and help them attract a tech-savvy client base.
Kubera is available anywhere in the world from desktop, iOS, and Android. Get started building out your investment dashboard today when you sign up for an affordable yearly subscription.
