Mutual Funds Cap Gains or Dividend Reinvestment

[Boris Goldowsky]

On Mon, 2004-09-13 at 00:47 -0400, Aaron Gaudio wrote:

> IMO, there is one of two ways reinvests should be handled:
> 
> 1. A direct transfer from the income:dividend:X account to the
> assets:portfolio:X account.
> 
> 2. A direct transfer from income:dividend:X to assets:portfolio (where
> non-reinvestments would go) and then another from assets:portfolio to
> assets:portfolio:X

The issue here is (unless I'm missing something) that Gnucash currently
has no knowledge of any connection between the assets:portfolio:X and
the income:dividend:X accounts.  In order to build reports correctly
attaching those dividends to that stock, it would have to have the
information that those two accounts are connected in that particular
way.  Quicken does this (in an ugly way, but it works) behind the
scenes, setting up the dividend accounts automatically when you create
the stock portfolio and remembering that they are connected, but Gnucash
doesn't have that mechanism.

It would be nice to have some guidance from the architects here -- is
the intention to have this sort of multi-account linkage eventually, or
alternatively is the idea that all activity should take place in the
stock account itself, including dividends (as I described in my last
post)?  At the moment the two-account method is documented (but doesn't
fully work), and the second nearly works (but may be risky since we
don't know if there's an intention to support it).

Bng
-- 
Boris Goldowsky <boris at alum.mit.edu>