Squarespace has an extensive user manual. Beginning users can easily find a Getting Started section. A searchable set of how-to articles and FAQ answer questions from more experienced users.

When we explored alternative platforms for Realized-app support, we wanted to emulate Squarespace as a starting point. We anticipated that a typical need for support might pass through three stages:

• Reading the manual
• Searching the forums for similar issues
• Asking a question via email

One aspect of Tender stood out from the other SaaS providers. It provides a searchable knowledge base to ‘Help your customers help themselves’. After seeing that feature, other platforms seemed to be just combinations of forums and email managers.

The stock of ABC (AmerisourceBergen Corp) split 2 for 1 on June 15, 2009. The split doubled the number of shares that each of the thousands of ABC stockholders held. For those tracking their investments with Quicken, each would then need to enter a transaction to record the stock split.

Having each of our customers enter the same publicly available information about a stock split seems like a missed opportunity. If Realized-app stored the stock split once, then why should it ever need to be entered again?

Realized automatically applies stock splits

As an example, two investors have purchased ABC stock. The first bought 100 shares on March 1, 2009 (before the stock split). The second bought 200 shares last week. Today, each holds 200 shares.

How does the share quantity of the first investor get adjusted for the split? The Realized-app already stores stock split info. Rather than asking the first investor to record the stock split, the Realized-app applies the stock split to that holding during the tax lot setup process.

Better usability

Because a web app uses a common data store, it can share public information among individual accounts. By reusing the specifics about a stock split among all of our users, Realized-app has removed one source of redundant or erroneous data input. In effect, we have improved the usability by removing the functionality of recording a stock split.

A year ago, Paul Graham listed a few Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund.

#21: “Finance software for individuals and small businesses. Intuit seems ripe for picking off. The difficulty is that they’ve got data connections with all the banks. That’s hard for a small startup to match. But if you can start in a neighboring area and gradually expand into their territory, you could displace them.”

We all watched as Mint entered that space. But both Quicken and Mint fall short when it comes to handling stock investments. Their data connections with financial institutions provide real convenience, but pose issues of security and privacy.

The web is full of personal finance sites with ideas about buying stock. Few address the problem of selling stock from a portfolio to minimize realized capital gains and maintain balanced diversification. And even fewer calculate capital gains and support the preparation of Schedule D.

To maintain privacy, rather than relying on a direct import from each broker, Realized-app uses the FasterCSV gem to import trade history from a .csv history file.

Realized-app began as a Ruby on Rails demonstration project. Time will tell whether security and privacy trump convenience.