Reinvested Dividends and Cost Calculation

[Allen Ziegenfus]

On the fine day of Mon, 21 Jun 2004 12:41:07 -0400
Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU> said very eloquently:

> 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.

Yes except I just remembered that in this case I was buying into
my fund through payroll deductions, so even the normal purchases were
coming from Income accounts. 

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

If I go to the transaction journal view of any investment account and
click on one side of a transaction, there is a field in the same place
as  the"Num" column that has the title "Action". This field is a drop
down list box that has 10 possible values including: Buy, Dist, Div,
Sell, Fee, etc.  You can see a picture of this in the GnuCash
documentation in section 8.7.1. Next to one part of the transaction
entitled, "Sell stock for profit" there is a field that has the word
"Sell". I never found any description of how this field is used, though.

At first I thought this was only in stock accounts but now I see it in
my mutual fund accounts as well. It is sort of "hidden" -- it only gets
displayed when you click in the right place. Maybe I could use this
column to change the report to get what I want! Although setting all
those flags will take some time. 

Allen