How Vanguard & AJ Bell calculate total portfolio P&L

hallmark

I have a SIPP with Vanguard and also with AJ Bell & I'm trying to work out how they calculate P&L.

Vanguard seems to work "nearly" how you'd expect.   If I take the current valuation & subtract everything ever transferred/paid in, it's roughly the amount they show as "Total gain/loss since inception".   I've not yet worked out why it isn't exactly the same.

AJ Bell is less straightforward.  As far as I can tell, their total +/- figure relates purely to how much the capital value of holdings has gone up/down.  It definitely doesn't seem to include, for example, Interest or Dividends (whereas Vanguard does).

This means although in reality both SIPPs have performed very closely, Vanguard tells me that I'm doing far better than AJ Bell.

It's not a real problem but a couple questions really

1. How exactly does Vanguard do their calculations?
2. Is there any way to tweak anything the settings in AJ Bell so that it reports a Vanguard-style P&L (i.e. total value of portfolio minus total originally paid in)?

GeoffTF

1. It does not matter. Vanguard may do the calculation correctly, but you cannot rely on it.

2. No. Again, you cannot rely on AJB's calculations either.

If you want a correct answer for tax or other purposes, you need to work it out yourself or hire an accountant.

ColdIron

To be accurate you must do it yourself. As Ellen Ripley says in Aliens: It's the only way to be sure

EthicsGradient

I'm unaware of any way to get AJ Bell to list everything ever paid in (apart from adding it all up yourself from the cash statements; for my SIPP, these only goes back to Dec 2012). What AJ Bell lists as the total in the Portfolio screen is the total paid for each of the investments you currently hold in the SIPP. So if you bought share A for £1000, sold it years later for £2,000, and used £1,900 of that to buy share B, it would just show share B, cost £1,900, and the total cost would be £1,900 (and if you'd done nothing else, it'd show the £100 cash).

Hoenir

EthicsGradient said:

I'm unaware of any way to get AJ Bell to list everything ever paid in (apart from adding it all up yourself from the cash statements

You will have been provided with contract notes for every purchase and sale bargain entered into. Also they will have notified you of any corporate events affecting your holdings. 

Can you not download a CSV file and copy/import the data into a spreadsheet.  Sorting and Filtering through shouldn't take too long. 

EthicsGradient

Hoenir said:

EthicsGradient said:

I'm unaware of any way to get AJ Bell to list everything ever paid in (apart from adding it all up yourself from the cash statements

You will have been provided with contract notes for every purchase and sale bargain entered into. Also they will have notified you of any corporate events affecting your holdings. 

Can you not download a CSV file and copy/import the data into a spreadsheet.  Sorting and Filtering through shouldn't take too long. 

This was about contributions to the SIPP, not the purchases and sales within it - the cash statement it is the only place those are recorded in the SIPP (you can look at your bank account too, I suppose). As I said, the cash statements only go back to 2012, so that won't cover all of many people's SIPPs. Personally, I did keep a record of what I contributed, but many people won't have, and even if they have, you then have to keep it all over the decades, transfer it all to new computers or have it backed up in the cloud (not so common, 20 years ago).

AJ Bell's records for transactions date back to August 2009 - again, not a full record for many people. You can only download past contract notes from 2016 or so onwards. Yes, people could have downloaded them all at the time, but it does require ongoing record maintenance.