What's your favorite year end method?

[Donald Allen]

On Dec 17, 2007 2:13 PM, Andrew Sackville-West <ajswest at mindspring.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 17, 2007 at 01:24:59PM -0500, Donald Allen wrote:
> > On Dec 17, 2007 12:57 PM, Andrew Sackville-West <ajswest at mindspring.com> wrote:
> ...
>
> >
> > >
> > > also, just out of curiosity, how are you computing your unrealized
> > > gains above? I'm having a terrible time getting the information I want
> > > out of gnucash without relying on the user behaving in specific
> > > ways. I have avoided things like using the Action field, for example,
> > > in stock transactions because they aren't required to enter the
> > > txn.
> >
> > I implemented it first without requiring anything in the action
> > fields, using a simple heuristic to distinguish transactions that push
> > a position in the same direction it's already gone (long or short)
> > from those that go the opposite way (they need to be processed
> > somewhat differently). But I decided to use the action fields instead,
> > because it made a number of things cleaner, easier and more accurate.
> > I did have to clean up my own data to fix the places where the actions
> > were null or wrong. This is the kind of thing I can require of myself,
> > but perhaps not of others.
>
> Without heading further down the path of new report implementation...
>
> It has become increasingly clear to me that in order to get any more
> useful reporting (specifically around stocks, funds) there has to be a
> requirement on the user to enter the information in some standardized
> way. Part of me feels like this is just lazy coding, asking the user
> to be specific and do things in a way that they might not find
> natural. But, my limited skills (really really limited) suggests that
> this is just the way it has to be. Still, I hesitate to go down
> this road. I'm essentially waiting for someone with more authority and
> experience to say "it's okay, just do it."
>
> The now classic example is the employer contribution to a stock or
> mutual fund in a payroll transaction. The user invariably wants to
> show that as income->buy-shares directly. Without examining the Action
> field, there is no way, other than guessing, to determine that this is
> a purchase without an associated dividend (a la reinvested
> dividend).
>
> Now what the user is doing here is abstracting the actual
> money flow. We all know, though the user might not see it, that the
> money is actually flowing into a brokerage account of some kind and
> that the buy is a separate transaction. If the user models it this
> way, with that interim account, then the reporting is much easier, we
> can rely on the fact that any income split that touches the account
> directly is some kind of dividend or otherwise directly related income
> event as opposed to the employer contribution. In a way, we already
> need to user to follow specific guidelines for this case, so I don't
> think it's too much to ask them to follow a different, more
> information laden, guideline.
>
>
> >
> > For dividend accounts, I also want to relate them to a commodity, so
> > that I can show dividends received in both an unrealized and realized
> > gains report. For that, I enter security namespace:symbol in the
> > income account's code field, to serve as a pointer to the commodity.
> > Again, something I can require of myself.
>
> I think this can already be done if you split the dividends into
> separate sub-accounts. Then all the txn's will tie back to a specific
> commodity and that information can be derived easily. It
> requires the user to setup their accounts a specific way. But, as I
> said above, it pretty much has to be that way. I think.

I do separate the dividend accounts into separate sub-accounts,
per-brokerage and per-security. Maybe I'm missing something (hardly
impossible), but the dividend accounts are income accounts, they live
in the Income part of the account tree, and their commodity is
currency. I don't know of a way to tie them to the asset (stock)
accounts they belong to with *any* account setup, other than the
improvised hack I came up with. But please educate me if I've got this
wrong.

/Don


>
> ugh. my brain.
>
> A
>
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