GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 755174
Need better documentation on using Lots in investment accounts
Last modified: 2018-06-29 23:43:08 UTC
Created attachment 311576 [details] thread from the gnucash-user mailing list discussing process WRT the "Concepts of Lots" (http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Concept_of_Lots), I want to use lots in my stock accounts, but the document "Lots Architecture & Implementation Overview" only talks about the concept and does not give many clues as to how one should use the "Actions > View Lots..." screen. For example, what does Scrub Account do? What does Scrub (a record) do? What does the Splits Free and Splits in Lots mean or do. I have studied the Tutorial and Concepts Guide Chapter 8 intently, particularly the 8.7 Selling Stock section. There is no mention of the "View Lots..." screen anywhere in that chapter. The 8.7 section discusses manually creating a stock sell splits, but There is no mention of how to specify a lot associating the sale with a buy. Thus I am requesting an enhancement of the tutorial to cover how to use the "View Lots..." screen. I have attached a thread from the gnucash-user mailing list which also includes my process for using the "View Lots" function ========= Chris Good suggested I create this issue. I will endeavor to provide a draft update for the tutorial.
Hi Philip, I've recently figured out how to do this and intend to document it soon. See http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2016-May/065408.html Have you managed to put together anything I can use to build on?
Hi Chris Yes, I did embark on an odt document on the subject, and put in about about 8 hours on it, but for the life of me I cannot locate the work. It was basically a screen dump blow by blow of the process I outlined in the email thread. I'll keep looking, but at this point I do not have anything for you. Philip
I've created pull request https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash-docs/pull/57 to document using lots to calculate investment capital gains. I decided to modify Selling Shares section to say that the capital gains splits need to be separate transactions from the sale, with examples, as a separate following commit (pull request?), as that is quite a lot of work, and involves restructuring what's in the above pull request again. So please don't close this after merging the above (assuming acceptable of course).
Cap gains don't have to be separate transactions unless you're using the Scrub Lots function, in which case Scrub Lots will make them for you. I don't remember at this point whether it makes a difference to the Advanced Portfolio Report; you should ask Mike Alexander about that unless you're sure that it doesn't.
The Advanced Portfolio report doesn’t use the capital gain splits to calculate capital gains. It calculates the gains from the various buy and sell transactions in the account without regard to whether the gains and losses are recorded or not. In fact, the realized gain splits, whether in the same transaction as the sale or not, sort of get in the way. They look a lot like income and the report goes to some lengths to make sure they aren’t counted that way. If they are recorded at all, realized gains must be recorded as two splits. One in the stock’s account with a zero number of shares and a non-zero value. The other should be in an income account with a value that is the negative of the split in the stock account. These two splits can be in a separate transaction or in the same transaction as the sale.
Hi Mike, Sorry for the delay in responding, I'm back from holidays now. Thanks very much for your info. I was going to suggest splitting the capital gain income split into taxable/non-taxable parts if that is applicable to your tax laws, but from what you say this will break the Adv Port Rpt, so I'll say instead this should be done in a separate transaction (with no stock split) if required. I'll add a comment to the Adv Port Rpt documentation about this too. I'm not an accountant but I would have thought in a loss case, the capital gain could be an expense account instead of income? Does it have to be income for the Adv Port Rpt?
It doesn't matter whether the second split is an expense or income account. It also doesn't matter if the gain or loss is recorded into two or more splits as far as the APR is concerned.
Thanks very much Mike.
https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash-docs/pull/57 was replaced by https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash-docs/pull/69 which was merged into maint 1/11/2016. https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash-docs/pull/71 has been created today for adding Lots in Account window documentation to Help.
PR#71 was merged 14-Nov-2016. I will do more mods: re comment 3 (+screen dumps in transactions journal view), some commission notes deleting lots before deleting capital gains transactions (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=774658) soon.
PR 86 was merged for GnuCash-2.6.16. Chris, are you finished with this bug?
This can be closed now thanks John.
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