Tracking National Savings (NS&I) Certificates

National Savings and Investments (NS&I), which is a British Treasury backed financial institution, provides a number of investments. Two of these are their Fixed Interest Savings Certificates, and their Index-Linked Savings Certificates. These provide guaranteed or inflation-beating returns respectively, and are tax-free.

Microsoft Money doesn't have these 'named' in the product, but they can be tracked. It is recommended that National Savings Certificates are tracked using the 'bonds' investment type in the investment portfolio.

To track these investments, create a single Investment Account (which could be called 'National Savings' - this will allow you to group other investments from the same provider, such as Premium Bonds - Article 127 in the same investment account).

If you have lots of certificates, them you should create purchases for all of these, grouping them together where they are the same type (for example, if you have a number of 10th index linked savings certficates bought at various times, then you would have multiple 'buy investment' transactions using the same Investment (named '10th index linked savings certificates'), and these would live within the same investment account). You can put in an interest rate (useful for the fixed interest savings, not so useful for the index linked ones) and maturity dates.

If you have different 'issues' of the certificates, then create new investments pertaining to each issue. Over time, you will have a number of entries in your portfolio, showing the data relating to the investments you hold.

When you come to sell, then you can match up the sale against the certificate received when purchasing (using the lot allocation tool).

Tracking them as bonds does introduce one quirk that Money has, and this is described in Article 43.