Advanced Portfolio report (was Re: What's your favorite year end method?)

[Beth Leonard]

On Wed, Dec 19, 2007 at 08:12:36AM -0800, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> I think I'll start a wiki page over the holidays taking the current
> stuff from Tutorial and Concepts and turning it into a framework for
> how txns should be structured. Hopefully others will help fill in the
> details to that there is a good spec to write to.

I should probably note that I don't yet actually use the stock
tracking features of GnuCash, to this point I've just looked
at the paper statements and said to myself "cool, I own some
company stock."  Now we've actually sold some however, and I
need to figure out a basis.  

Until now I never realized tracking it could be so complicated...

This is stock bought on a company matching plan 2 1/2 years later,
(they give me a matching number of shares if I still work there
years later) which split into another company, which also spun off
shares in a third (and possibly fourth) company.  That 4th one
was made private and I was sent a check for $313.00 that I have no
idea what the basis is.

According to my accountant, there are several ways I can account
for it, but all of them sum up as "I'm screwed" and "I should
have kept better records when they sent me notices that I now
owned shares in more companies."

So I intend to use GnuCash to help track these things in the
future.  It's better than saying "You mean I should have kept
that letter from 8 years ago?"

--Beth 
Beth Leonard
http://www.LeonardFamilyVideos.com