Most people open their statement, look at one number at the bottom, and close it. I understand why. It's a dense document full of terms nobody explained, and the one figure that looks like an answer is sitting right there. But the lines people skip are where the useful information lives, including two that'll cost you time and money if they're wrong.
So here is the whole thing, in order, in plain language.
The top: who you are, and where the money goes back to
Folio number. Your account number with that fund house. One folio can hold several schemes from the same fund house, and you can hold folios at many fund houses. This is the number to quote whenever you contact anybody about it.
Name, PAN, address. Read the name character by character. A folio that says "R K Sharma" while your PAN says "Rajkumar Sharma" causes no trouble at all while you're investing, and a fortnight of it the day you redeem or the day a family member claims. Fix mismatches while it's boring.
Bank account. This is where redemption money goes, and nowhere else. If it is a salary account from a job you left, you have a problem waiting for the worst possible moment. Our guide on changing the bank account on a folio covers the fix.
Nominee. If it says "not registered", stop reading this article and go and register one.
The transaction lines
Each row is one event, with a date, a description, an amount, a NAV and a number of units.
Read one row across and the whole mechanism is right there: your rupees divided by the NAV that applied on that date, giving you units. That's all a purchase is.
Common descriptions and what they mean:
- Purchase / SIP instalment. Money in, units allotted.
- Redemption. Units sold, money out.
- Switch out / Switch in. A move between schemes, which is a redemption and a purchase, with the tax and exit load that implies.
- IDCW payout. Income distribution. It isn't a bonus; it's part of your own holding paid out, with the NAV falling correspondingly.
- Stamp duty. A small statutory deduction on purchases, which is why the units allotted can look slightly lower than a clean division suggests.
Fractional units are normal. Seeing 43.281 units is not an error.
The numbers at the bottom, and which one lies to you
Units held and current NAV. Multiply them and you have the current value. That is the only calculation on the page you ever need to do yourself.
Cost value. What you put in, in total.
Absolute return. Current value against cost value, as a percentage. This is the number everybody reads, and for a SIP it is close to meaningless. It treats an instalment paid last month the same as one paid six years ago, even though one has been invested seventy times longer than the other.
XIRR. This is the honest one. It accounts for when each instalment went in, so it answers "what rate would produce this outcome given these dates". If you're running a SIP, XIRR is the figure worth looking at and absolute return is the one to ignore.
If your statement shows both and they differ sharply, that is expected, not an error.
The three lines to check every single time
You don't need to study the whole document regularly. You need to check three things.
- Nominee registered? Highest consequence, takes two seconds to check.
- Bank account still open and yours? This decides whether your money arrives in two days or two weeks.
- Email and mobile current? Every future update is verified through them, so if these are stale, nothing else can be changed.
Everything else on the statement is information. These three are maintenance, and they are the ones that break at exactly the wrong time.
Two lines people misread
"Balance units" after a redemption. When you redeem part of a holding, the statement shows the units sold and the units left. People sometimes read that row as a loss because the unit count went down. It went down because you sold them. What's left is balance units multiplied by NAV, and that's the only figure answering the question.
The same folio appearing several times. One folio can hold several schemes from the same fund house, each with its own units, NAV and value. If your statement seems to repeat a folio number, it isn't a duplicate; it's one folio with several schemes under it, and the totals at the bottom cover all of them.
Statement, CAS, and which to ask for
A fund house statement covers your folios at that fund house only. A consolidated account statement covers every fund house against your PAN in one document, and it is the one to use when you want the whole picture.
Request the CAS from either registrar using your PAN and registered email. It arrives password-protected, usually with your PAN in a specified format as the password. Most people who do this find at least one folio they had genuinely forgotten, and our guide on finding old mutual fund investments walks through it.
Ask for it yourself, to your own email. A statement is a complete map of what you own, and you should be the one who obtained it.
Once a year, do this with it
An annual read takes about fifteen minutes and it's the only regular maintenance this whole thing needs.
- Open it properly rather than glancing at the app total. The app shows value; the statement shows detail.
- Check the three maintenance lines above, since they're the ones that break silently.
- Look at XIRR, not absolute return, and don't compare either against a single year of anything.
- Note what you actually hold. Most people are surprised at least once, usually by a scheme they'd forgotten adding.
- Save the file somewhere your family can find it, or at least tell somebody which email it arrives at.
That last one does more for your household than any amount of scheme selection. A folder with one recent statement in it is the difference between money that reaches your family and money nobody knew about.
What the statement will not tell you
Two things worth knowing, because people look for them and then assume something is missing.
Your exit load position per purchase. The transaction dates are all there, but the statement does not usually work out which units are still inside the exit-load window. For a SIP that is instalment by instalment, and it matters when you redeem, as our guide on stopping a SIP and withdrawing money explains.
Whether the scheme suits you. No statement answers that. It tells you what you own and what it is worth, not whether the horizon matches the goal.
If you would like somebody to go through yours with you, including folios that were never invested through us, that is routine work here and there is no charge for the review. Myfolios is an AMFI-registered mutual fund distributor (ARN-145870) working since 2014. Get in touch. And if the reason you are reading your statement closely is that the value is down, our guide on what a red number actually means is probably the more useful page.
