Karatasi MMF & Special Fund Tracker

Most Kenyans who invest do it across two or three funds at once. A Money Market Fund for the emergency cushion, often a second one chasing a slightly higher yield, and increasingly a Special Fund like Mansa X, Oak, or Kibaba Multi-Asset for actual growth. It's a sensible portfolio. The problem is keeping track of what each one is really earning you.

Fund houses publish gross yields because they make the marketing easier. After the 15% withholding tax on interest, management fees of 1.5% to 2%, performance fees on Special Funds, and 4% to 7% inflation, your real return looks very different from the headline number. The Karatasi MMF & Special Fund Tracker is the spreadsheet that does the maths properly, in Kenyan Shillings, with Kenyan tax rules built in.

What it tracks

You register your funds once — name, manager, fee structure, minimum, lock-in period. Up to 16 funds at a time, which covers anyone short of an institutional investor. Then you log two streams of data as life happens: transactions (every deposit and withdrawal, with M-Pesa reference) and balances (whatever the fund sends you on its statement, monthly or quarterly). The Dashboard takes care of everything else.

For each fund, the Dashboard shows you total contributed, total withdrawn, current value, gain or loss in Kenyan Shillings, simple return, annualised return as Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR), and the more accurate Extended Internal Rate of Return (XIRR) — the money-weighted return that accounts for the exact timing of every contribution. This is the same method professional brokerages use to report performance. Most retail trackers don't bother.

Below those, two columns put your number in context: how your fund compares to the prevailing Kenyan MMF benchmark yield (which you set in Settings), and what your real return is after subtracting the inflation rate you specify. The whole dashboard recalculates the moment you change a single input.

Why both CAGR and XIRR

If you put a lump sum into a fund and let it sit, the two numbers will be identical. The moment you start making contributions over time — monthly top-ups, a withdrawal during a tough month, a lump-sum addition after a bonus — they diverge. CAGR treats your money as if it had all been working from day one. XIRR knows your September deposit only had four months to grow, while your January deposit had a full year.

For a portfolio with regular contributions, XIRR is the honest number. For a single-deposit fund, CAGR is faster to explain. Showing both means you can see which one is right for the question you're asking, and notice when contribution timing is meaningfully affecting your reported return.

Who this is for

• Salaried professionals running an MMF for emergencies plus a Special Fund for growth, and tired of guessing whether the higher fee on the Special Fund is actually paying off.
• Business owners separating personal investment money from operating cash and needing clean records that work for KRA documentation.
• SACCO members diversifying beyond the SACCO into MMFs, and wanting a single view of all their investment assets together.
• Anyone who has more than one fund and has ever wondered which one is actually earning more.

What's inside

• Cover — quick orientation and a sheet index.
• Settings — the four numbers that drive everything else: withholding tax rate (defaults to 15%), inflation rate, benchmark MMF yield, and report date. Change any of them and the whole workbook recalculates.
• My Funds — your fund register. 16 slots, each capturing fund name, type, manager, minimum entry, management fee, performance fee, hurdle rate, and lock-in months. Pre-filled with starter examples.
• Transactions — 60 slots for deposits and withdrawals. M-Pesa reference field on every row. Built-in totals and dropdown validation to prevent typos.
• Balances — log statement values whenever your fund sends them. The Dashboard uses the most recent one automatically.
• Dashboard — the main view. KPI strip up top with four headline numbers, then a per-fund table with ten columns of analysis, then a portfolio total row weighted by current value.
• Comparison — side-by-side fund view with allocation percentages and a bar chart of how each fund is performing against the others.

The honest part

A spreadsheet is not a financial adviser. A few things to know before you start.

• You enter the data. If your statement balances are wrong, your returns will be wrong. Plan to update the Balances sheet whenever a new statement arrives, monthly is ideal.
• Past performance isn't a forecast. A fund that returned 22% last year can return 8% next year. The tracker tells you what has happened, not what will.
• Withholding tax rules can change. The default is 15% on interest income, which is current Kenyan policy. If KRA changes it, you change the rate in Settings and everything recalculates.
• Special Fund returns are not guaranteed. The tracker shows your actual returns based on actual statements. It can't protect you from a bad year. It can only tell you, clearly and quickly, that you're having one.

How it works

Download the file once. Open in Excel or Google Sheets. Replace the sample funds with your own, enter your transactions, drop in your latest statement balances. The Dashboard tells you what's working. Update it whenever new statements arrive — usually about ten minutes a month.

No subscription. No account. Your data stays on your computer. One file, yours forever.