Reinvested Dividends and Cost Calculation

[Allen Ziegenfus]

On the fine day of Mon, 21 Jun 2004 10:17:27 -0400
Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU> said very eloquently:

> Did you check the report options?  I don't know if there's a way
> or not.  If not, well, you're welcome to submit a patch.
> 
> > Is there any way to get GnuCash to not display the value of
> > reinvested dividends in the "Money In" column of the Advanced
> > Portfolio report? 

Well there are no options for that. I'd be happy to look at it when I
have some time. However I'm not sure that it would be an easy thing to
do. I would guess that some additional metadata would have to be added
to every investment account transaction to indicate whether it was a
reinvestment or not, maybe along the lines of the "Buy"/"Sell"/"Fee"
info in stock accounts. What is that "Buy"/"Sell" flag used for now?

I suppose another way might be to just change the report to exclude
transactions that come from Income accounts. 

Actually, I found one way to do this which is to enter the reinvestments
as transactions that don't have any share price or dollar value, just a
number of shares. But this seems like a bad hack, and then the
reinvestments will no longer show up as income. Although maybe that's
the right thing for IRA accounts since the reinvestments don't really
become income till you actually withdraw the money.

Has anyone else experimented with this or thought about it? How do other
people handle income in retirement accounts? I admit I'm pretty muddled
as to accounting (actually I'm just off to the library to get that
Schaum's accounting book).

Allen