Stock Splits, Stock Dividends, Mergers, etc.

[Bill Carlson]

Hi,
	I've been playing around with how to enter stock
transactions like splits, stock dividends, mergers, etc.
After much trying, I think the most logical way of handling
these is to have a zero price transaction in which you
buy (or sell) some number of shares as reflected by
the stock dividend.  For example, if I owned 50 shares
of ABC corp which gave a stock dividend of 25 shares,
(3-for-2 split), my stock account for abc would look like

  date   descr     acct  bought  sold  price  value  totshare  balance
 9/14/00 Price                          15             50       750
 9/15/00 Stock Div         25            0     0       75       0
 9/15/00 Price                          10             75       750

I think this accurately represents what happend in the transaction,
but I don't like the balance dropping to zero.  Therefore, I
am contemplating a change in Account.c to cause the balance
of this split to be set to 750 (the previous value) much the
same way entering a price without any bought or sold does
not change the total shares.   Also, there needs to be a
minor change to the "transaction out of balance" calculation
in SplitLedger.c when editing a transaction like this.  At
the moment, the only way to enter one of these (zero price) trasactions
is to enter it from scratch.  I'm perfectly willing to figure out
the necessary changes, but before starting this, I wanted
to know what the list thought of this idea, or if anyone
had a better idea of how to deal with this sort of transaction.
Also, I could update the docs to describe this method
if people thought it was a good idea.

		Cheers,

		Bill Carlson
		wwc@wwcnet.nu