Scrub Lots

[John Ralls]

On Oct 11, 2014, at 3:37 PM, Gregory Gincley <rollenwiese at fastmail.net> wrote:

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> 
> I don't understand the behavior of this account function? Maybe
> someone out there can help me out.
> 
> For me, if I scrub the lots of a mutual fund account in order to
> obtain a capital gain/loss transaction as a result of a sale, all my
> realized gains transactions are recalculated. I get many new 'realized
> loss/gain' transactions associated with sale transactions where it has
> previously been calculated? The new realized gain/loss transactions
> mostly have different ammout values, but occasionally are the same.
> 
> I'm not sure why this is occuring? Whether it's an artifact of how my
> data was entered, or a lack of understanding of how this function
> should be used.
> 
> I receive a quarterly cash distribution from four IRA accounts where
> there might be a capital gain/loass realized.
> 
> Everytime I enter these new transactions in the account ledger, I have to:
> 
> 1) delete all the lots in the account
> 2) delete all the realized gain/loss transactions that were previously
> generated by the 'scrub lots' function.
> 3) enter the new distribution transaction
> 4) once again 'scrub lots' in the account
> 5) associate the generated transactions with my existing realized
> gains account tied to each mutual fund account
> 
> 
> My transaction information in the ledger is not changing as quarters
> come and go. What is causing these capital gain/loss amounts to be
> regenerated with slightly different values everytime I scrub the account?
> 
> Thanks for any insight out there,
> 

Having spent most of the summer battling this code in my experimentation with different ways of handling numbers in GnuCash so that 2.8 will be able to handle smaller fractions for Bitcoin and a certain Romanian mutual fund company, I think the problem has to do with inconsistent rounding. It’s a bit convoluted, so it’s hard to be sure, but that’s the answer I can give. 

It’s not you nor what you’re doing. Alex Aycinena has just proposed to use this code for another way of handling multiple-currency transactions, so it will be getting some attention in the next several months. We can hope that it will work better in the next major version.

Regards,
John Ralls