CAS -- the guide to keep track of your investments

There are over 14.5 crore mutual fund accounts in the country valued over Rs 40 lakh crore. And several of the investors don’t know how to track their investments and that too at one place. All investors can see their MF investment at one place through a statement called the Consolidated Account Statement or CAS.

Every mutual fund investor receives CAS from Central Depository Services Limited (CDSL) or or National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL) or Computer Age Management Services. You need to know how to check CAS and analyse it… This will help you plan your investment management strategy in a more effective way..

The CAS contains information about all transactions related to demat account and mutual fund portfolio. The CAS gives you details of transactions in shares, mutual funds, sovereign gold bonds, debentures and money market  in on ereport. For example, if you have invested in three mutual funds, the details of purchases, sales, switches, SIPs/STPs/SWPs, dividend payments, etc. in all of them, in a given month will be available in the CAS.

CAS is sent to investors on 10th of every month with details of financial transactions for that month. The statement is sent every month only if there is a transaction in the demat account. If there is no transaction, CAS arrives every six months. First in April and second in October. E-CAS ie CAS arrives in electronic form on mail only when you have registered the mail, otherwise it is sent in physical form to the address given in KYC. CAS makes it easy to manage investments. Investors get a better understanding of how to track the performance of mutual funds… It also helps in tax planning as investors get details of all mutual fund folios at one place.

If you find that some part of your portfolio is not showing in CAS, then you should immediately check a few things.. First of all see if there has been any transaction in the portfolio in that month? Because only the financial transactions that took place in that month are included in the CAS. So, check whether the PAN of all the unitholders of the portfolio is updated or not.  If not, then get the PAN updated immediately so that you do not face such problems in future.  In case the PAN is updated, then inform the concerned mutual fund company or registrar.

An investor expects to get a decent return from his investment. So how and where does one check that.
In today’s digital world, there is no need for investors to crunch their brains in the excel sheet to calculate returns based on Net Asset Value.. Today all fund houses send a fact sheet to their investors, in which it is known that what returns their scheme has given so far… Apart from this, you also get the information about returns, on the website of the fund house.

People who invest with the help of a broker or advisor, get periodic fund performance information and portfolio updates. Apart from this, many websites and smartphone apps also keep tracking the returns of the schemes. On many websites you get the option to track a particular portfolio.

So you must have understood that if you are investing in mutual funds, then you must have basic knowledge like reading CAS, reviewing returns. It is also important to note in Mutual Funds, that past performance is not a guarantee that the future performance of a fund will be better… ie you cannot predict how a fund’s performance will be going forward. You have to keep a constant eye on your funds.