Buyer's guide
An honest buyer's guide to investment subledger software
We sell one of these. You should hold that against this page until it earns otherwise. What follows is the evaluation we would run if we were sitting on your side of the table: the eight things that actually determine whether a securities subledger works at a credit union or community bank, the questions that separate a real answer from a brochure answer, a proof you can run in a day on your own data, and an explicit list of the situations where we are the wrong choice and you should buy something else.
Nothing here names a competitor, because a comparison table written by a vendor about vendors it competes with is worth very little. What is worth something is a set of questions you can put to every option in front of you, including ours, and get comparable answers back.
Before the criteria: decide what you are actually buying
Three different products get sold into this gap and they are not interchangeable. A subledger maintains the transaction-level record behind your investment control account and produces the entries and the support. An outsourced accounting service maintains that record for you and sends reports on a schedule. A portfolio analytics or reporting tool tells you about risk, yield, and structure but is not a book of record and will not close your month. Plenty of evaluations go wrong because two of the three were compared against each other on the same scorecard. Decide which one closes your month before you compare anything, and if the honest answer is that a service fits your staffing better than software does, that is a legitimate outcome of an evaluation rather than a failure of one.
The eight criteria that actually matter
Ordered roughly by how much damage a weakness does. The first three break your close. The next three break your exam. The last two break your budget or your continuity plan, which hurts later but hurts longer.
1. The accounting engine, tested rather than described
Everything else is packaging around this.
- Is premium and discount amortization computed on the effective-interest method, per holding, using a yield locked at acquisition? Ask to see the schedule for one security on screen, period by period.
- How are callable holdings purchased at a premium handled? US GAAP as amended by FASB ASU 2017-08 shortens premium amortization to the earliest call date for callable debt securities with explicit, noncontingent call features callable at fixed prices on preset dates, while discounts continue to amortize to maturity. A vendor who cannot discuss this fluently has not built for your instruments.
- Which day-count conventions are supported, and what happens on a stub period, a reset, or a mid-period purchase with accrued interest bought?
- Can it recompute a prior period and produce the same numbers, and can it show you what changed if it does not?
2. Coverage of the instruments you actually own
Pull your holdings list before the demo and check it line by line.
- Bullets, callables, step-ups and step-downs, variable-rate resets, agency and municipal issues, certificates and time deposits, and anything held without a CUSIP.
- Mortgage-backed pass-throughs with monthly factors: where does the factor come from, what happens when it arrives late, and can a prior month's factor be corrected without corrupting the periods after it?
- CMO tranches: sequential, planned-amortization with support, and accrual structures. A payment waterfall is either modeled or it is not, and the answer is easy to test with one real tranche.
- The rule of thumb: bring your three most awkward securities to every demonstration. Vendors demo bullets. Your close is decided by the awkward ones.
3. A real period close and a real GL tie-out
The difference between a calculator and a system of record.
- Is there a period close that locks, so a closed month cannot silently change after you have signed it and filed from it?
- Does every posted entry carry the holding-level detail that produced it, so you can trace a general ledger balance down to individual securities without rebuilding anything?
- How are prior-period corrections handled? The right answer is a guided, documented correction with a visible trail, not an unlogged edit and not a refusal that forces the correction into a spreadsheet.
- What does the tie-out compare against: the ledger, the custodian statement, coupons actually received, and published factors, or only against numbers the system itself produced?
4. Reporting that matches what you actually file
Ask for output, not a feature list.
- Investment support organized the way your call report needs it, with holding-level backup behind each total, and produced from a closed period rather than from live data that moves after you print it.
- Amortized cost and fair value by classification, realized and unrealized amounts, maturity or weighted average life distributions, and call and step detail.
- Can you rerun last quarter's package today and get last quarter's numbers? If not, your support is not reproducible, and reproducibility is what a reviewer is testing.
- Exports that feed your other processes, including asset liability and credit loss workflows, rather than a closed system that forces re-keying at the boundary.
5. Audit trail, access control, and approval history
This is what turns numbers into evidence.
- Who changed what, when, and can that record be altered? An audit log the user can edit is decoration.
- Role-based access at the function level rather than file-level permissions, including who may close a period and who may reopen one.
- Approval history on the close, so you can show what the numbers were when they were approved and by whom.
- Backup and restore evidence: not only that backups exist, but that a restore has been performed and produced a dated, verifiable record. Untested backups are a plan, not a control.
6. Migration, in detail, before you sign
The single most underestimated line in every evaluation.
- Exactly which fields carry over: identifier, acquisition date, original cost, current amortized cost, effective yield or the price behind it, accrued interest receivable, classification, factor history, current face, and call and step schedules.
- What happens to holdings with no CUSIP, and what happens to history the source system cannot export.
- Does the vendor support a parallel run for one period, and will they help you reconcile it? Ask what the reconciliation is expected to prove and what tolerance they consider acceptable, then decide whether you agree.
- Who does the work, what it costs, and how long it takes. Get the answer in writing before purchase, not after.
7. Where your data lives and who can reach it
The question your risk committee will ask, phrased the way it should be.
- Where does the portfolio data physically reside, who at the vendor can access it, and what exactly does the vendor hold if you cancel?
- What does support need in order to help you? If troubleshooting routinely requires sending your holdings file, that is a recurring data-transfer decision, not a one-time review.
- Encryption at rest and in transit, and how encryption keys are protected. Installer authenticity: is the software code-signed by a verifiable publisher and published with a checksum you can confirm before deployment?
- Attestations: ask what the vendor holds, what is in scope, and what is not. A report scoped to a hosted environment says nothing about the software you install, and a vendor should be able to explain that distinction without discomfort.
8. Total cost, exit, and what happens if the vendor disappears
Priced over three years, not one.
- License plus implementation plus migration plus annual increases plus any per-user, per-portfolio, or per-report charges. Ask for the renewal increase in writing.
- The internal hours the close still takes after go-live. Software that saves twelve hours a month and costs twenty in workarounds is not a saving.
- Exit terms: what you can export, in what format, on what notice, and what the refund and cancellation terms actually say. Read the refund policy rather than the sales page. Ours is narrow: it covers a genuine, verified defect that stops you from using what you paid for, not a change of mind, and it is published in full.
- Continuity: if the vendor goes away, does your book keep working? For hosted software the honest answer usually depends on contractual arrangements. For installed software the answer is that your data and your last installed copy remain on your machine.
Where FI Investment Tracker is the wrong choice
A guide that concludes you should buy the guide's author is an advertisement. Here is the list we would give you if you called and described a situation that does not fit us. Every one of these is a real reason to buy something else.
01
Your core has a capable module
If your core platform offers an investment module that covers the instruments you hold and posts to the general ledger automatically, take it. One vendor, one contract, no cross-system reconciliation every month. That convenience compounds, and we would rather say so than argue against it.
02
Nobody wants to own the accounting
Software does not supply expertise. If your team is thin and no one wants securities accounting as part of their job, an outsourced bond accounting service will serve you better than any product, including this one.
03
Your policy requires SOC 2 with no exception
We do not hold a SOC 2 attestation and will not imply we do. If your vendor management policy makes it a hard gate with no documented exception path, we fail that gate today. That is a legitimate policy and a legitimate reason to pass.
04
You need customer references
We are early and have no customer list to point at, and we will not manufacture one. If your process requires reference calls with peer institutions, we cannot satisfy it. What we offer instead is verifiable evidence and an evaluation on your own data.
05
You need macOS, or a browser
FI Investment Tracker is Windows desktop software today. If your accounting team runs macOS, or your requirement is browser access from anywhere on any device, the shape is wrong and no amount of feature depth fixes that.
06
You need a live core interface
We work from files you export and produce packages and entries your team posts. We do not maintain live certified interfaces into core systems. If eliminating the manual posting step is the point of the project, weigh that heavily against us.
07
You want a price feed included
Fair values come from the custodian, provider, or market-value files you import. We are not a market data vendor and do not bundle pricing services, so that subscription and that relationship stay yours.
08
You want a risk model, not a subledger
This is a book of record. It produces exports that feed asset liability and credit loss work, but it is not an interest rate risk model, not a credit loss model, and not a trading or order management system. If that is the gap, this is not the product.
Where we do fit
The situation we are built for is narrow and specific: a credit union or community bank whose investment book has outgrown a workbook or an aging desktop tracker, that owns instruments with real accounting complexity including mortgage-backed and structured positions, that wants the portfolio data to stay inside the institution rather than in a vendor cloud, and that would rather evaluate software on its own data than sit through a procurement cycle. If that is not you, one of the eight boxes above probably is, and we would rather you find that out on this page than three months into an implementation.
The questions to ask every vendor, including us
Send these in writing and compare the written answers. The pattern that matters is not who answers best, it is who answers precisely. Vague answers to specific questions are the finding.
On the accounting
- Show me the amortization schedule for one holding, period by period, on screen. Which method, and what yield are you using?
- How do you amortize a premium on a callable security, and what happens when the call is not exercised?
- Take these three CUSIPs from my portfolio. Load them and show me the first month's entries.
- Where does the factor for a mortgage-backed position come from, and what happens if it arrives after we close?
- Show me a correction to a prior closed period, start to finish, including what the audit trail records.
On the close and the evidence
- What exactly does the period close lock, and who can reopen it?
- Show me the reconciliation between the subledger and the general ledger, and tell me which sources it compares against.
- Can I reproduce a package I filed two quarters ago, today, and get identical numbers?
- What does the audit log capture, and can any user alter it?
- Show me the evidence produced by a backup restore.
On data, security, and support
- Where does our portfolio data live, and what do you hold that we would have to ask for back?
- What information does your support team need from us to troubleshoot a problem?
- Is the installer code-signed, and is a checksum published before download?
- What attestations do you hold, what is in scope, and what is explicitly out of scope?
- If we cancel, what can we export, in what format, and how long do we have?
On money and continuity
- What is the all-in cost for three years, including implementation, migration, and expected increases?
- What is your renewal increase, in writing?
- What does your refund policy actually cover, and what does it exclude?
- How long has the product existed, how many people maintain it, and what happens to our book if you stop operating?
- What are you not good at? A vendor who cannot answer this either does not know their product or is not being straight with you.
Run a one-day proof instead of a six-month evaluation
A demonstration on the vendor's sample data proves only that the software runs. The evaluation that actually predicts your experience is one real period on your own holdings, and it can usually be done in a day. Insist on it from every vendor, and treat an inability to offer it as information rather than an inconvenience.
Step 1
Load a real holdings file, including your three most awkward securities, and reconcile the loaded totals to your last closed report before anything else.
Step 2
Close one period end to end: amortization, accretion, accrual, and paydowns, with the entries visible at holding level.
Step 3
Tie the subledger to the general ledger, and confirm the differences are explainable rather than plugged.
Step 4
Produce the investment support you would actually file from, then reproduce it a second time and confirm the numbers are identical.
Step 5
Run a backup and a restore, and keep the evidence. Then write down what you could not do, because that list is the real output of the proof.
Red flags, ours included
Treat these as signals to slow down, whoever is on the other side of the table. A vendor who will not show the amortization schedule for a single holding on screen. A price that requires a discovery call before it can be spoken. A claim that a product is examiner approved or regulator endorsed, which is not a status any software vendor holds. Certification language that implies an attestation the vendor does not actually have, in the scope implied. Customer counts and testimonials that cannot be traced to a named institution willing to take a call. A refusal to describe a single limitation. And on our side of the table specifically: we are a new company with no customer references and no SOC 2 report, which is a real risk you are entitled to weigh, and the honest mitigation we offer is that you can verify the installer signature, verify the checksum, and prove the accounting on your own data before you depend on it.
What should an investment subledger evaluation actually test?
One real period on your own holdings. Load your portfolio, close a period, post the entries, tie the subledger to the general ledger, and produce the investment support you would file from. A demonstration on the vendor's sample data proves the software runs. Only your own securities prove it handles your instruments, your conventions, and your reconciling items.
How much does investment accounting software cost for a credit union?
Most vendors in this category quote rather than publish, so a comparable range is hard to assemble without going through several sales processes. We publish our prices on the pricing page, and the total cost of any option should include implementation, data migration, annual increases, per-user or per-portfolio charges, and the internal hours the close still takes after the software is in place.
Is a SOC 2 report required to buy investment accounting software?
That depends on your own vendor management policy, not on a rule we can state for you. What is worth separating is the question behind it: a SOC 2 report attests to how a vendor protects data it holds on your behalf. If a product never holds your portfolio data, the exposure it is meant to cover does not exist in the same form, though your policy may still require the report. We do not hold a SOC 2 attestation and we will not imply otherwise.
When is FI Investment Tracker the wrong choice?
When your core provider offers an investment module that covers your instruments and posts to the ledger automatically, when nobody at your institution wants to own securities accounting and an outsourced service fits better, when your policy requires a SOC 2 report or customer references with no exception path, when you need macOS or browser access, or when you need a live certified interface into a core system. The full list is on this page.
Where our job ends and yours begins
Your institution files its own reports and remains responsible for its filings. Nothing on this page is regulatory, accounting, tax, or legal advice, and the accounting references here should be confirmed against the guidance currently in effect with your own auditors. Classification elections, day-count conventions, fair-value sources, materiality judgments, and vendor management policy belong to your institution. This guide is a set of questions, not a substitute for your own due diligence.
If we survived your own criteria
Pricing is published rather than quoted, checkout is self-serve with no sales call, and the installer is code-signed and checksummed so your IT team can verify it before it is deployed. Your first working session on your own portfolio is the evaluation, and your data never leaves your machine while you run it.