Tracking realized gains/losses with mutual funds

[Matthew Vanecek]

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On Mon, 2002-12-09 at 23:33, Errol Siegel wrote:
> Anyhow, you are on the mark with your suggestion
> EXCEPT for the fact that your sample transaction does
> not balance.  You debited the loss expense account,
> but do not show a balancing credit.
>=20

Yeah, I noticed that after I hit the "Send" button.=20

> The best workaround I've been able to come up with
> today is to fudge the selling price of the shares.=20
> This maintains the correct share balance in the
> account, but inflates the credit side of the
> transaction to balance the debit to loss expense.  I
> would enter the transaction as though I sold the
> shares for the original $5/share instead of the actual
> $3/share.  It looks like this:
>=20
> Transaction #2 - sell 5 shares of MF @ $3
>      shares  price   credit  debit share-balance
> MF    5       5        25           25
> cash                          15
> Loss                          10
>=20

The more I look at this, the more I think Dave's changes are going to be
a BIG help

The Sell transaction would balance fine, if you did not need to record
the realized loss.  I mucked around a bit, and here's what I came up
with:

	Shares	Price	Buy	Sell	Share-Balance
MF	50	5	250		50
Bank				250
---------------------------------------------------------
MF	-25	3		75	25
Equity-Imbalance		50
Bank			75
Loss Exp		50


This way, the transaction balances, and you can enter the correct sell
price.  It may be just a kludgy workaround in accounting terms, but I
don't think the Equity would show up on the Balance Summary reports (or
whichever report it was that prompted this discussion).  It's an extra
step that shouldn't be needed.  It also demonstrates the pitfalls of
balancing *transactions* as opposed to balancing the General Ledger
(which is what I learned way back in college).

It would be better to not have to manually figure this out, most
definitely!

--=20
Matthew Vanecek
perl -e 'print $i=3Dpack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(115),10);'
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*****
For 93 million miles, there is nothing between the sun and my shadow except=
 me.
I'm always getting in the way of something...

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