Reinvested Dividends and Cost Calculation

[Derek Atkins]

I would think that just looking for 'transfers from income' would be
sufficient to detect a reinvestment.  Normal purchases would come from
a liability or asset account, not income.

There is no "buy/sell flag" -- where do you think you see one?

-derek

Allen Ziegenfus <listmail at allenz.net> writes:

> 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
>
>

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available