AMA: I’m Jessica Lamb, director of Practice Dynamix, Ask Me Anything!

Hi deborah.kent - Thanks for your question. 

Based on the reference to 'fix a corporate action' I assume you are referring to a Corporate Action has been executed on XPLAN, but the resulting transactions are not what you are expecting. 

When a Cortporate Action is run, it will allocate transactions for earned income, actual income, or the purchse / sale of actual shares all based on your Corporate Actions settings under 'cash and accounts' and the type of Corportate Action you are running. So ensure these are set correctly against your clients. 

In a perfect word, the Corporate Action result is 100% correct. And in my experince we are seeing this more and more. The resulting income and cash is quite often 'spot on'. What we do see from time-to-time is the allocation of earned units throught a DRP. XPLAN doesn't account for proportional earnings of a share that carry forward. In this instance the solution is to edit the transaction with the unit allocation and update this to the correct number of units. Typically the cost and earning is spot on, just need to adjust the total number of shares allocated. 

Basically - If a Corporate Action results are incorrect, first option is to just update the resulting transaction. This is the only solution for DRP's with carry forward units.

If a Corporate Action is wrong for all clients, then it can be reviewed by XPLAN and they can make a change to the calculation methodolgy - I have not had to report an incorrect Corporate Action to XPLAN in the last 7 + Years, so I am confident these are running quite smoothly for income. But if this does need to occur, you can use the update button to have the Corporate Action run with the updated methodology. 

Beyond that, we don't see too many work arounds or unknowns when it comes to Corporate Action management. They are incredibly powerful and cetainly save a lot of admin time - but they are also straight forward. My top tips for using Corporate Actions on XPLAN are:

1. Ensure your Corporate Action settings are correct across all portfolio accounts.
2. For clients with a DRP, ensure this is recorded against the holding to make running corporarte actions faster
3. If your data is good, then you can consider turning on auto Corporate Actions so they can run in the backgroud. But this only works when your settings are well managed. We typically only recommend turning on the Dividend Options.