Stock Trading and Dividends

[mdevin]

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Hi everyone,

I have just installed gnucash 1.6.6 on a Debian Woody system.

My question relates to stock trading.  After going through the mail
archives and the User Manual, I am still confused about how to enter in
buy/sell transactions.

Could someone give me a blow by blow description of how to enter the
following trade example:

14/7/2002 Buy 1000 BHP shares - costing $10000 plus $100 brokerage
15/7/2002 BHP sends me a dividend cheque for $75
16/7/2002 Sell 1000 BHP shares - receiving $11000 less $110 brokerage

I am really confused about how to enter the buy and sell transactions
and especially the dividend cheque.  I need to be able to look at the
whole transaction and know that I have received a total return of:
$11000 (Sale proceeds)
- $110 (brokerage on sale transaction)
- $10000 (Cost of original purchase)
- $100 (brokerage on buy transaction)
+ $75 (dividend)

In other words, how do I set it up so that the account that receives the
dividend knows about the shareholding that the dividend was for?

Then I have more questions about how to enter the details about franking
credits.  In Australia, we have a thing called franking credits, which
are tax credits for the tax the company has already paid on the
shareholders behalf for their dividend payment.

Could someone please educate me on how to do such transactions properly
with gnucash?  Or indeed double entry accounting in general?

Thanks in advance.
Mark.

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