GnuCash presentation

[Charles Day]

On Wed, Dec 24, 2008 at 2:13 PM, John R. Carter, Sr. <john at jrcarter.com>wrote:

>
> On Dec 23, 2008, at 2:00 PM, Charles Day wrote:
>
>  -You may want to mention that importing a transaction that represents a
>> sale of securities will NOT cause appropriate capital gain/loss entries to
>> be created in GnuCash. These must be added by hand after import.
>>
>>
> Reading the User Guide helps to know how to set up for tracking capital
> gain/loss, which I've now done. Most of what I've learned about GnuCash has
> been intuitive for me. Not this. Fascinating! Another update coming to my
> documentation.
>

It's really impossible for the capital gains transactions to be added
automatically, because GnuCash doesn't know which shares you sold. For
example, if you buy shares of XYZ at various prices, then sell half your
stake, what is the gain/loss? It depends on which shares you sold.

It would be nice if GnuCash could put these sale transactions in some kind
of holding queue and make the user specify which shares were sold or a
method (FIFO, etc.) before committing the transaction to the account. Then
the gain or loss entries could be included automatically. But this feature
just doesn't exist at the moment.


> John Carter
>

-Charles