Tabulating and calculating returns is important as this allows one to know how bad or how good one has fare thus far. I've tried so many others but none is as practical as XIRR. However, the amount of data I've to type into the spreadsheet is seriously cumbersome.
I must say it's seriously tough to start doing XIRR initially. There have been lots of error and some errors are errors which I don't even know why they exist. There are some bad examples from google and following them could be quite misleading. Eventually I did some trial and error and got it all solved.
There are two things that I feel one should take note when dealing with XIRR.
1. Keying in the date
XIRR is very particular with the date format you keyed in. You can't just simply type "1/1/2011" or "1st Jan 2011". The correct way of doing ......