Consolidated Account Statement — The One Document Worth Pulling

Two registrars between them service most fund houses in India, and either can produce a statement covering your holdings across all of them, identified by your PAN.

That is different from a statement from one fund house, which shows only the folios you hold there. If you have invested through different routes over the years, at different times, with different people, the individual statements will not add up to the whole picture and the CAS will.

It arrives by email as a password-protected file, and the password is usually your PAN in a specified format. If nothing arrives, the usual cause is that the email registered on your folios is not the one you are checking, which is itself worth knowing.

Go to a registrar\'s website and request it using your PAN and the email address registered on your folios. It is free and there is no need to go through anybody.

Two versions are generally available. One shows current holdings and valuations, which is what you want for a review. The other shows transactions over a chosen period, which is what you need if you are reconstructing history for tax purposes or working out an XIRR, as our XIRR calculator requires actual dates.

Request it yourself rather than asking somebody to send you a copy. A CAS is a complete map of what you own, and you should be the person who obtained it. That applies to us as much as to anybody else.

You do not need to study the whole document. You need to check three things, and they are the three that break at the worst possible moment.

• Nominee. If any folio says none registered, fix that this week. Our guide on adding or changing a nominee covers how, and the absence of one turns a simple transfer into months of documentation.
• Bank account. Every redemption goes to the account on the folio and nowhere else. An old salary account there is a two-week delay waiting to happen.
• Email and mobile. Every future update is verified through them, so if they are stale, nothing else can be changed until they are fixed.

Everything else on the statement is information. These three are maintenance, and our guide on updating folio details sets out the order to do them in.

Four things, in roughly this order of frequency, and none of them is unusual.

A folio nobody remembered. Started through a colleague, a bank relationship or an app during a period when investing felt interesting.

A tax-saving scheme bought in a hurry one March, whose lock-in ended years ago and which nobody has looked at since; our page on ELSS funds explains how those lock-ins work per instalment.

Folios with no nominee, particularly anything opened before nomination became routine.

Several schemes doing much the same thing, accumulated one decision at a time, which our guide on how many schemes to hold deals with.

Worth knowing so you do not assume the picture is complete when it is not.

A CAS covers mutual fund holdings identified against your PAN. It does not cover shares held in demat, provident fund balances with current or former employers, deposits, small savings accounts, or anything held in another person's name.

It also will not show a folio where your PAN was never correctly recorded, which is rare but happens with very old folios. If you are certain something exists and it does not appear, that is worth chasing with the fund house directly rather than concluding it is gone.

So treat it as the complete mutual fund picture rather than the complete financial one. For the rest, the same afternoon is the right time to make a list.

Once the cleanup is done, an annual pull takes about fifteen minutes and mostly confirms that nothing has changed.

Do it at the same time each year, read the three maintenance lines, look at XIRR rather than absolute return, and note whether you can still say what each holding is for. Our guide on reading a mutual fund statement covers what each figure means.

One caution while you are doing this. A CAS is generated against your PAN and email, which means anybody who can request it can see everything you own. Keep the file where you keep other financial documents rather than forwarding it around, and be wary of anybody who asks you to share it before explaining precisely why they need it.

And save the file somewhere your family can find it, or at least tell somebody which email it arrives at. A perfectly maintained folio that nobody knows about still goes unclaimed, and that single habit does more for a household than any scheme decision.

If you would rather somebody went through yours with you, including folios never invested through us, that is routine work here and there is no charge for the review. Get in touch.