Gnucash Advanced portfolio

[Mike Alexander]

--On May 2, 2014 10:39:52 PM +0100 Daniel Dodson 
<daniel.dodson at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Forgive me if you're not the correct person to ask, but I noticed
> you've been the main contributor to the advanced portfolio script
> this year so would at least know who to pass the question off to.
>
> I've been using Gnucash for my person finances and having been trying
> to use the stocks and shares to monitor progress of all the shares I
> own. One thing that eluded me until recently was how to make cash
> dividends appear in the advanced portfolio report under 'income'.
> Only scrip (I believe they're sometimes also called reinvested in
> other jurisdictions) dividends were appearing previously. More
> recently I looked at the Scheme and noticed that the income column
> fathomed this out its value from the splits in the account. So by
> having the following transaction....
>
> Income:Dividends:StockA         a_number
> Assets:Cash:CurrentAccount    a_number
> Assets:Stocks:StockA            (for some reason no value is
> allowable here)
>
> The last split caused the Advanced Portfolio to include the cash
> dividend. So this achieves what I was looking for. But the odd thing
> is that this is not mentioned anywhere in the documentation/tutorials
> that I've seen. I also spoke with some people in the IRC channel
> (somebody called 'warlock') and they were not aware of this feature.
> Is it intentional and likely to remain?
>
> Daniel

Questions like this are better sent to the gnucash-user mailing list. 
I happen to be the last person to work on that report, but I'm hardly 
the only person with interest in it or knowledge about it.

You're right that this is the way to tie a dividend transaction to the 
stock so it will appear in the report.  If you want to update the 
documentation to properly reflect this, be my guest.  Generally it's 
better if documentation is written by someone other than the developer 
who implemented the feature.  It's more likely to be complete and 
understandable in that case.

           Mike