For investors looking for a single record that can offer a one-shot view of all their market investments, the electronic consolidated account statement (CAS) from the two depositories, CDSL and NSDL, have proved a godsend. Once you sign up to receive e-CAS, the depositories e-mail you a comprehensive statement detailing your holdings in listed stocks, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), bonds and mutual funds. You receive the statement monthly if you make regular transactions, and on a half-yearly basis if you don’t.

But CAS can also have many other uses, apart from helping you monitor how your portfolio value is moving. Here are some useful features of the NSDL-CAS that you may be unaware of.

Double-check holdings

Do you run frequent checks on your bank account to see if the cheques you’ve deposited, transfers you’ve made and electronic credits you’ve received are reflected correctly in your account? Well, doing the same with your demat account is crucial, too, to ensure the broker or intermediary you deal with — for your buy and sell transactions of shares, bonds and ETFs — is really executing them at the dates and prices at which you instructed.

This has become quite important after the recent Karvy controversy where it came to light that some intermediaries were able to divert their clients’ securities for their own purposes.

Running a check on the ‘Transactions’ section of your monthly CAS can help you verify if your buy and sell orders in shares, bonds and ETFs are executed and reflect correctly in your end-of-month balances.

The ‘Mutual Fund Folios’ part of the same section helps you verify if the platform or distributor through whom you’re buying or selling MFs, is sticking to your instructions.

If you invest in shares or MFs through multiple platforms or have a mix of direct and regular plans, this section also gives you a consolidated view of all your trades across the different routes.

Identify lost investments

Worried you have mutual fund or stock market investments made ages ago that you have completely lost track of? Well, tracking down such forgotten investments has become quite easy with CAS statements. To compile your CAS, the depositories aggregate all your stock, bond and MF holdings across different platforms using your PAN (Permanent Account Number).

Therefore, as long as your holdings are in the demat form (or unit form in the case of funds) and you have provided a PAN at the time of investing, all your investments over the years will reflect on CAS. In the case of MFs, you can use the details provided in CAS to find the folio number under which you had originally invested. Thereafter, using the AMC’s own website, or that of its registrar, to track down the original investment, and re-activating them is quite easy.

Monitoring bonds

Compared with shares or mutual funds, investments in bonds are easy to lose track of, given that you make a one-shot investment that will mature after many years. This is especially true of cumulative or zero-coupon bonds where there are no regular interest credits into your bank to remind you of the investment.

Well, whether you’ve invested in tax-free bonds, NCDs (non-convertible debentures) from companies or Sovereign Gold Bond (SGB) issues from the government, CAS helps you keep track of all listed bonds you hold in demat form.

The ‘Corporate Bonds’ section of NSDL CAS has useful details of the nature of the bond (tax-free/zero-coupon, etc), the frequency of interest payment and maturity date, apart from the number of bonds you’ve invested in and their face value. These details are critical to track and plan the reinvestment of interest payouts and maturity proceeds. If you’re keen on a secondary market exit, the ISIN (International Securities Identification Number) provided in CAS can help you locate the bond on the trading platform.

Succession planning

In the days of yore, investors had to maintain painstaking written records of all their share certificates, MF investments, bond holdings and other investments, so that their heirs would know where to look for their investments in the event of their passing.

CAS, by consolidating all your market investments into one record, has done away with the need to maintain such records.

To ensure that your heirs don’t have to rummage through your paperwork to get a comprehensive view of your legacy, all you need to do is enable them to access your CAS statement. Sign up for your CAS statement to land in your most frequently used email account and ensure that your heirs have access to that email account and its password. Thereafter, all they would need is your PAN to access the statement.

To ensure smooth transition though, it is important that you have designated nominees for each of your investments. The CAS has a useful feature in ‘Know more about your accounts’ section that helps you verify if you have a registered nominee for your demat account as well as individual fund folios. Run through the list and make sure that no investment of yours lacks a registered nominee.

The same section is also very useful to check that your current email ID, mobile number, PAN and bank account details — critical to receive timely updates about your investments — are current across all your investments.

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