New Zealand-founded Sharesight has been around for over ten years, with the purpose of giving investors an insight into the performance of their entire investment portfolio in real-time. As the name suggests, Sharesight can keep track of your shareholdings, but it also has the ability to track cash assets and then send that data to third-parties such as Xero or your own accountant. In essence, Sharesight is a one-stop solution for managing an investment portfolio, helpfully based in the cloud with 24/7 access and support.

Sharesight is serious about its features, with a number of helpful tools and in-depth functionality to aid investment decisions and tracking performance. Standout features include:

• Integration with Xero to reconcile transactions - the software integrates directly with Xero to help you reconcile dividend payments and buy/sell transactions. You can also see your bank balances within Sharesight to give you an overall view of your financial position.
• Price alerts - You can set Sharesight to alert you to changes in stock prices so you can make informed decisions on whether to buy or sell individual holdings.
• Automatic dividend reporting – Sharesight automatically records dividend payments so you can easily factor these into the performance of your portfolio.
• Easy tax reports – Sharesight generates IRD compliant tax reports that can make filing your tax return easier. This report is available on all plans, including the free tier.
• Broker Email import – If you receive trade confirmation emails from a supported broker, you can forward this email to a user-specific email where Sharesight will import the transaction into your portfolio. Sharesight can automatically record your buy and sell trades into your portfolio via the PDF contract note (trade confirmation) attachments that are emailed to you by your broker after a trade has been completed.
• Benchmark your investment – Sharesight allows you to compare the performance of your investments with over 200 different ETF funds to see if your investments are beating the market or not.

Sharesight works as a 'freemium' model. It's free to sign up to and the free version lets you track up to 10 different shares (holdings). For those who require more, the fees are as follows:

1. $15 per month / $165 per year – Up to 20 holdings within one portfolio
2. $25 per month / $275 per year – unlimited holdings within three portfolios, plus more reports and Xero integration
3. $39 per month / $429 per year – unlimited holdings within four portfolios, plus all available reports, ability to create 5 custom groups and priority support

 
Sharesight also offers Sharesight Pro, which offers all Sharesight’s features for those who are tracking many portfolios and is aimed at professionals such as accountants or financial advisors. We have not reviewed Sharesight Pro, but pricing details and feature information can be found here.

Pricing - what to watch out for:

• Be aware that the free version only allows you to track 10 holdings.
• For many investors with diversified portfolios, a limit of 10 will not be enough.
• For this reason, a lot of investors will fall into the $15 or $25 per month plans, an ongoing expense for some smaller investors might not make sense financially.
• The free plan and $15/month plan only offer 'community forum support', and no Sharesight customer service. To get email support, you need to upgrade to Sharesight's $25/month 'Investor' plan.

As you would expect with any website dealing with financial information, Sharesight encrypts your information which means that it is virtually impossible for people without the encryption keys to read your data. A popular method of securing your account further is to enable two-factor authentication. This is a standard feature offered by Sharesight, and makes it much harder for unauthorised people to access your account.

Sharesight offers apps for both the Apple App Store and Google Play. Overall, user ratings are positive, although user experience issues flagged for improvement include:

• The inability to save the way you view your funds - there are no features to allow personalised settings (such as dollar or percentage, filters and investment groupings etc), so on each app visit, your portfolio is presented to you in the default setting mode. 
• As a stand-alone app, $15/month seems expensive relative to the standard price of an app. However, our view here is that the app can't be a stripped down version of the website, and we see it more as a free add-on than an individual tool.

1. Sharesight have a solid offering, and have a track record of continuously adding new features and improving the product.
2. With the free membership tier, you can import a few holdings and load trades as you make them, and see if Sharesight adds value to your investment decision-making and performance tracking.
3. If your share broker is not currently supported by Sharesight, there are two alternatives of data sources - direct import or email import. If these are not options to you, Sharesight can be time-consuming to set up. The best approach is to go for automation, and once done, Sharesight makes it easy to keep on top of things.
4. If your investments declare dividends, Sharesight helpfully has an automatic process that suggests dividend payments.
5. We like the fact that despite being a New Zealand company, Sharesight is widely used in Australia, the UK, Singapore, Canada and the USA, meaning its expansion benefits users by continuously offering new product features.

Want to know more, or sign up to Sharesight? Visit their website for more information.

Do you have experience using Sharesight and have something to share?
Email our research team today.