MProfit

In this era of pacing technology, there has been an enhancement in the ways investors choose to obtain their optimal portfolio. The web is crowded with a number of solutions for management of portfolios. But when investors look for a secure portfolio management tool, most of the available option don’t suffice their needs. What comes to the rescue is a highly nimble, efficient and remarkable portfolio management solution, Mprofit.

Mprofit is a portfolio management and accounting software. The company which was founded by Kiran Shah, Pallav Bhatt and Manish Jain, is providing a unified solution for the management of investments, accounting and tax returns. This start-up caters to the entire investing community, including Investors, Traders, HNIs, Family Offices, Financial Advisors, Stock brokers and CAs.

Here is the interview with the Co-Founder & CEO, Kiran Shah.

Q1. Tell us about your product MProfit and the problems that it solves. Give a use case.

MProfit is an easy to use portfolio management and accounting software catered for use by investors, financial advisors, family offices, HNIs and businesses to efficiently manage all of their financial assets using a single platform. These financial assets include anything from stocks and mutual funds to bonds, FDs, Insurance and ULIPs, among others. MProfit is the only available software that helps manage and consolidate disparate asset classes, in addition to providing a comprehensive accounting module that is closely integrated with its portfolio management solution. Accounting ledgers are automatically created from imported transactions, thereby eliminating the duplicate work of entering every transaction into a separate accounting module. This helps save users a significant amount of time.

One of MProfit’s unique propositions is its import engine. MProfit can directly import digital contract notes from brokers, mutual fund statements and bank statements with minimal effort. The software currently supports import from more than 1600 different sources, which is the highest amongst all Indian financial software products.

MProfit provides various useful reports such as capital gains reports (with indexation and without indexation), annualised (XIRR), asset allocation and others.

Use Cases:

1. Financial Advisors use MProfit to manage clients’ portfolios and generate useful client reports such as XIRR, capital gains and asset allocation reports in addition to advisor reports such as AUM and client-wise asset holding.

2. Individual investors, traders and family offices use MProfit to manage their investment portfolios and to prepare P&L statements and balance sheets using the integrated MProfit Accounting module. MProfit generates capital gains reports as per income tax rules even after corporate actions, which is an especially useful feature for this category of users.

3. Charted Accountants use MProfit to generate capital gains reports for their clients as well as manage clients’ portfolios using MProfit.

Q2. How did you hit upon the idea for your product MProfit?

Being investors ourselves, we had previously undergone the tedious process of managing our investments using complex excel sheets to generate XIRR and capital gains reports. We also had to manually enter the same details again into separate accounting software. The entire process was very tedious, time-consuming and error-prone. We realised that all investors would be facing similar problems and if we were able to automate this process using a unified portfolio management and accounting solution, investors would be able to save a significant amount of time, which could be devoted to more productive tasks such as researching new investments. At the time, we looked everywhere for a software like Quicken in the US, that could efficiently and in a user-friendly manner, manage investments across asset classes. Unable to find any such single solution in India, we saw an opportunity to build it ourselves.

Q3. How is MProfit different from other products in the same category?

We at MProfit embrace competition. There are a few players in this area that provide solutions that somewhat compete with us. Some are good at managing only one or two asset classes and do not include accounting capabilities. MProfit is the only software that manages all asset classes including F&O and seamlessly transfers all investment data to its accounting module.

MProfit differentiates itself from other competing products in terms of the following:

• Ease of use

• Management of all asset classes

• Provision of continuous live price updates (for stocks, MFs, Bonds and F&O)

• An integrated accounting module

• A commitment to quick and effective customer support

• Lower pricing and specialised versions of the software for different segments such as investors, family offices, companies, CAs and financial advisors.

Q4. How did you find your first client?

We started selling MProfit online and it was well received by the investing community. Our first client bought MProfit on our website.

Q5. Tell us about the larger groups of your customers and where they are spread geographically. 

MProfit caters to clients of the entire investing community, including Investors, Traders, HNIs, Family Offices, Financial Advisors, Stock brokers and CAs. MProfit has its clients spread across India from metros to smaller cities. In particular, MProfit has an especially large presence in cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Pune and Ahmedabad.

Q6. Name some other software products you use to increase productivity.

Asana, Google Apps and TeamViewer are a few of the software products that we use for internal purposes as well as to support our clients.

Q7. Tell us about some immediate plans that you are currently working on. And what’s next for MProfit?

We keep improving and adding new features to MProfit based on feedback from our clients. We recently released a major update through which MProfit has begun supporting live bond prices and capital gains for traded bonds. We have also added a few important advanced reports to this version.

Our future plan is to develop a cloud version of MProfit. It is currently in an early stage of planning. Stay tuned for more information on this.

Q8. Tell us about your management team. What is your source of motivation?

MProfit was started by three co-founders, Kiran Shah, Pallav Bhatt and Manish Jain. Kiran is the CEO, Pallav is the CTO and Manish is the VP of Business Development at MProfit. All three co-founders have been involved in multiple start-ups over the past 20 years. The biggest motivation for us has been a desire to create a best-in-class product, deliver world class support and provide a phenomenal experience to our clients.

Q9. Any milestone or achievements in the journey till today that you are proud of/makes you happy?

One of our biggest achievements has been continually improving MProfit’s import engine, which now supports direct import from over 1600 sources, which is the highest in India. These sources include broker contract notes, mutual fund statements, bank statements and other statements in formats including PDF, HTML, Excel and Text.

Q10. As an insider in this domain, what insights would you like to share about new trends in the enterprise IT space?

The rollout of 4G across India in 2016 can be a game changer for many businesses. It will create phenomenal adoption of cloud computing and will open up significant opportunities for entrepreneurs across India.