Reinvested Dividends and Cost Calculation

[Derek Atkins]

Allen Ziegenfus <listmail at allenz.net> writes:

> 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. 

Make this two steps: Income -> Brokerage, and then Brokerage ->
Stocks/Funds Then the "stock" transactions are actually coming from
the brokerage (asset) account and not an income account.  This
actually better reflects what's going on in most cases, anyways.  :)

>> 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. 

Ahh, I see..  The "action"..  Yea, I suppose you could use these,
but there's nothing that forces a user to set this.  So.. It's not
guaranteed to work.

I'd still suggest going with Income.  Or make an option to choose whether
to use income-account or action field to detect the type of transaction.

> Allen

-derek

-- 
       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