Advanced Portfolio and dividend in cash (was: How to register adividend in cash?)

AmigaPhil AmigaPhil at ping.be
Fri May 8 18:42:17 EDT 2009


Resume from the previous episode  ;-)
 - Summary:

   I have registered some dividends paid in cash as explained in
   the Tutorial and Concepts Guide - 8.8.1. Dividends in cash
   http://svn.gnucash.org/docs/guide/invest-dividends1.html#invest-dividendcash
   That is: to balance the Assets:Brokerage account with the
   Incomes:Dividends one.

   As I would have liked to see that dividends to appear in the
   Advanced Portfolio report, I searched for clues on the list archives
   and found a thread with the same topic (from June 2003):
   http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2003-June/007020.html

   As the conclusion from that (old) thread was that it is not possible
   to include dividends in cash in the Advanced Portfolio report as the
   transactions are not part of the portfolio, I posted a suggestion to
   update the report script:
   http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2009-April/029542.html
   And filled a bug (enhancement):
   http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=581191
   (The idea was to make the script to look into Incomes:Dividends for
    accounts with the same code as the share accounts.)


Still curious, I tried to find if I could tweak something from myself,
and had a look at the Advanced Portfolio source.

I don't know much about scheme and I don't really understand how this
script works, but I can see that there IS some mechanisms to integrate
dividends in the report.

So for testing, I edited my dividends transactions, and balanced them
straight with the share accounts (leaving the 'items' and 'price' fields
empty.  Checked the Advanced Portfolio... and BINGO: the "dividends in
cash" are in the report like I wished.


So now my questions:

- Are there any reason to make this method deprecated ?
  (Other than the fact I won't see the dividends as incomes anymore.)

- Is it just that the Tutorial needs some updates ?



AmigaPhil



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