Your Folio — The Account Behind the Units

A folio number identifies your account with one particular fund house. Within it you can hold units of several of that fund house schemes, and each purchase adds to the same folio unless a new one is created.

It is not a scheme number and it is not a unique identifier for you across the industry. Your PAN does that job. Somebody investing with four fund houses will have at least four folio numbers, all belonging to the same person.

The number is what you quote on any request, so it is worth having it somewhere you can find. It appears on every statement, as our guide on reading a mutual fund statement shows.

Multiple folios with the same fund house are common, and they usually happen by accident rather than by choice.

An investment made through one route years ago, another made later through a different one, a small difference in how the name or address was recorded, or a joint holding created alongside a single one. Each of those can produce a separate folio for the same person at the same fund house.

It is not harmful in itself. What it produces is a household that does not know what it holds, which is a real problem when somebody else has to find it later. Our guide on finding old investments covers the recovery, and our page on the consolidated account statement covers the document that shows everything at once.

Consolidating folios within a fund house is usually possible on request. Whether it is worth doing depends on how many there are and whether anybody other than you would ever need to deal with them.

On the application there is a choice about how the folio is held, and it gets ticked without much thought. It has consequences for years.

Single holding means one person owns and transacts. Simple while that person is available and harder for the family afterwards, which makes the nomination on it more important rather than less.

Joint holding with either or survivor means either holder can transact alone, and on the death of one the other continues. For most couples this is the arrangement that causes the fewest problems later.

Joint holding requiring both signatures means every request needs both. It is occasionally what people want, and it is worth choosing deliberately rather than by mistake, because it makes routine servicing slower.

Changing the mode later is possible but it is a process rather than an update, and it needs everybody named on the folio. That is the argument for getting it right at the start.

A folio holds a set of details, and stale ones are behind most of the requests that stall.

• The bank account where redemptions are paid, which our guide on changing the bank account covers.
• The mobile number and email where confirmations go, and an old number here stops more things than anything else.
• The nomination, which decides how much friction the family faces later.
• The address, and the KYC details behind it.

None of these update themselves. Somebody who changed their number four years ago still has the old one on a folio opened before that, and finds out when a request needs a code sent to it.

A folio can be opened in a child name, and it comes with rules the ordinary case does not have.

Until the child turns eighteen, a parent or legal guardian operates it, and the bank account linked to it has to be one that involves the child rather than only the guardian. No joint holding is permitted on a minor folio; the child is the sole holder and the guardian acts on their behalf.

The part households forget is what happens at eighteen. The folio does not carry on quietly. Transactions stop until the status is changed to adult, which needs the child new signature, fresh bank details in their own name and their own KYC. Any standing instruction, including a running SIP, stops at that point rather than continuing.

None of that is difficult if it is expected. It becomes a problem when nobody knew and an instalment fails months after the birthday, so it is worth putting the date somewhere you will see it. Our page on SIP for a child marriage covers the longer goals this usually sits inside.

There are reasons to keep separate folios on purpose, which is different from having them by accident.

Money for different purposes held separately is easier to track, particularly where one pot is for a goal with a date and another is long-horizon money. Households sometimes keep a child goal in its own folio for exactly this reason, as our page on SIP for child education discusses.

A separate folio is not the only way to ring-fence money for a goal. The solution oriented category does it with an actual lock-in, which is a stronger version of the same idea and a good deal less flexible.

Against that, more folios mean more statements, more details to keep current, and more for somebody else to find. Our view is that deliberate separation for two or three clear purposes is useful, and everything beyond that is usually accumulation rather than design.

Worth doing once, and then only when something changes.

• Pull a consolidated statement against your PAN and see every folio that exists.
• Check the mobile and email on each one are current.
• Check the bank account is one that is still open.
• Check the nomination is present and still says what you want.
• Tell one person in the family that the list exists and where it is.

That last one is not paperwork and it is the one people skip. Our guide on what happens afterwards explains why it matters more than the rest put together. If you would like somebody to run through your folios with you, that is ordinary work here and there is no charge for sorting out what exists. Get in touch.