Over the past year I have bought bonds through three different places. Some through BondScanner, some through GoldenPi, and a couple of G-Secs directly through my Zerodha demat. Each platform shows me only what I bought through them. I have no single view of my total bond portfolio, upcoming coupons, what is maturing when. Is there a way to see all of this in one place or do I just have to keep a spreadsheet?
The single best place to see everything is your consolidated account statement, your CAS, from CDSL or NSDL. Since all your bonds are in your demat regardless of which platform you used to buy them, the CAS shows every holding in one place. Log into CDSL’s portal at cdsl.com or request a CAS through your DP. It lists every ISIN you hold, the quantity, and the current face value. It is the ground truth for your entire portfolio including stocks, mutual funds, and bonds all together.
that sounds useful but does it also show upcoming coupon dates and maturity dates? or just what you hold?
The standard CAS shows holdings and current valuation but not always upcoming coupon schedules. For that you need to do a bit more. Once you have the ISIN of each bond from your CAS, you can look up each one on the NSE website or on platforms like BondDekho or FixedIncome.in which let you enter an ISIN and see all the upcoming payment dates. It takes maybe 20 minutes to set up a simple tracker the first time but after that you just check it when a coupon is due.
is there any single app that just does all this automatically. like you link your demat and it shows you everything
A few apps are building in this direction. Tickertape and Kuvera have some portfolio tracking features. INDMoney aggregates across accounts. None of them are perfect for bond-specific tracking yet but they are improving. The challenge is that bond coupon schedules are not standardised data the way stock prices are, so apps struggle to pull them automatically. For now the most reliable method is the CAS plus a small personal spreadsheet with each bond’s coupon dates and maturity entered manually once when you buy.
The spreadsheet approach is less painful than it sounds. Each bond you buy has maybe five pieces of information worth tracking: the ISIN, the face value you hold, the coupon rate, the payment dates, and the maturity date. Enter it once when you buy and you have a complete view. Set a calendar reminder three days before each coupon date and each maturity. The total time cost is maybe 10 minutes per bond. For a portfolio of 10 bonds that is 100 minutes total, spread across all your purchases.
Okay so the plan is: pull a CAS from CDSL to get a complete picture of what I hold right now, then build a small spreadsheet with coupon dates and maturities for each bond going forward, and use calendar reminders for payments. Not as complicated as I thought. Going to do the CAS thing this weekend.