[Patch] reworked advanced-portfolio.scm

[Mark Johnson]

Andrew Sackville-West wrote:

>3) a stock account with shares in it but with no pricedb entry. In this case, I made the assumption that the file was broken. There should always be a pricedb entry if there are any shares in an account, IMO. Probably the code should be fixed so that any buy or sell or similar action automatically creates a pricedb entry. Still we have to account for 1.8 files that might be broken in this regard. phew. [...]
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Automatically, creating entries in the pricedb for any buy, sell or 
"similar action" strikes me as a rather dicey thing to do.  I offer two 
similar recent use cases I have had to consider:
1. One of my mutual fund companies decided (correctly) that it had an 
excessive number of indistinguishable funds.  Therefore, two similar 
funds were merged, with one surviving.  I had units in the non-surviving 
fund.  These were exchanged for a different number of units of the 
surviving fund (at a different price, of course).  Now, this is an 
exchange and not a buy/sell.  I don't realize capital gains.  So I wish 
to record this in such a way that the cost basis of the new (to me) fund 
is the same as the cost of the old fund.  (This keeps the balance sheet 
balancing, as I don't have capital gains to enter to balance it.)  I 
enter a split to two mutual fund accounts, showing one decreasing by the 
number of surrendered units and the other increasing by the number of 
units in the new fund.  The dollar amounts shown in the buy and sell 
columns are the cost basis of the fund.  Note that if this were used to 
create an automatic entry in the pricedb, it would not be the current 
market price.  It would be the (sadly higher) original cost.  Thus, such 
an automatic entry would not be appropriate in this use case.

2. I have an employee share purchase plan with several stock 
sub-accounts.  Two are important here - vested and nonvested shares.  
 From time to time, shares will vest.  These are to be transferred from 
the nonvested account to the vested account.  Again, I do not realize 
capital gains, and so record this based upon the cost of the shares.  
Otherwise, I would either unbalance the balance sheet, or record capital 
gains income which is not, in fact, income.  (Recording this using an 
"unrealized gains" account would make calculating the real capital gains 
confusing at the actual time of sale.)  Again, an automatic pricedb 
entry would not be an accurate market price.

So I disagree with automatically creating pricedb entries.

I've tried both use cases in g2 a couple of weeks ago, and they worked.  
Though thanks to things I learned using 1.8.x, I did not try anything I 
expected to unbalance the balance sheet in g2.  Sadly, due to moving to 
a new house, I've fallen behind in recording real transactions and have 
not yet determined if these use cases work in 1.8.12.

Mark