Advanced Portfolio

[Andrew Sackville-West]

On Thu, Dec 21, 2006 at 10:21:56AM -0500, Henry M. Benson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm in the process of setting up GnuCash (2.0.3/MacOS 10.3) for
> investment tracking.  I've noticed several problems in the Advanced
> Portfolio, related to basis and gain calculations.  To make a long
> story short, I've looked in Bugzilla and found that most of the 
> issues have already been reported.

hi, 

i did a bunch of work on the advanced report portfolio, about a year
ago and as a result, fixed some broken stuff and introduced many
broken things :(.

> 
> I'm posting here rather than gnucash-user because I'm wondering if
> anyone is working in this area.  If not, I'd be happy to take a look.
> Please let me know.  Any advice and startup suggestions would be
> welcome.  

I don't have a lot of time to devote, but would be happy to help in
whatever way I can. My biggest issue was I ended up working on things
I didn't really understand. My original goal was to implement some
display settings for a user who requested it. I ended up trying to fix
some other broken behavior in the report (some of which succeeded, I
think), but left other parts of it undone. The biggest issue I think,
is that I tried to implement a way of really tracking gains based on
three different models - FIFO, FILO and average price (i think). I did
not however, handle all the possible methods that the value of shares
could change (splits, reinvestments, etc) resulting in bad results for
any but the simplest cases. There were also some difficulties in
getting reliable data because we couldn't force users to make pricedb
entries. I think I got that more or less handled by using register
data when pricedb data wasn't available. 



> 
> A quick introduction since this is my first post here:  I'm a senior 
> software developer, consultant, small business owner and de facto
> accountant, and disgruntled long-time Quicken user.  I've been using
> GnuCash (1.8, 2.0.x) for about a year for business and am now setting
> up my personal finances.  It's a great product, thank you all very
> much, and I'd like to volunteer to help.  Perhaps I've already found
> something I can do?

The report itself, is really pretty simple (IIRC) and I'm happy to
pitch in a bit. Have you looked over the code yet? and are you
familiar with scheme/lisp? I think if we could get a really good set a
requirements for how the report handles particular cases, it could be
shaped up fairly easily. I'll checkout a new tree here in the next
couple days and take a look myself.

A
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