Capital Gains Input Question

[David T.]

--- On Sat, 12/11/10, Fred Bone <Fred.Bone at dial.pipex.com> wrote:

> From: Fred Bone <Fred.Bone at dial.pipex.com>
> Subject: Re: Capital Gains Input Question
> To: "David T." <sunfish62 at yahoo.com>
> Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Date: Saturday, December 11, 2010, 3:08 PM
> On 11 December 2010 at 14:39, David
> T. said:
> 
> > I have been trying to enter capital gains/loss in
> 2.3.17 on a Mac, and I
> > want to understand an interface gotcha. Specifically,
> it it Extremely
> > Confusing that when you want to enter the split lines
> for capital gains in
> > a Stock or Mutual Fund account, you can't enter the
> dollar figure for
> > capital gain directly in the transaction register for
> the stock. If you
> > try to do this, Gnucash requires **and will
> automatically assign** a
> > number of shares and a per share price--an action that
> is guaranteed to
> > throw your portfolio off.
> 
> Wrong. This is explained, quite well though perhaps not
> perfectly, in the 

Ah, well, MY problem was that I looked at Chapter 9--you know, that one that is titled "Capital Gains"?

> "Tutorial and Concepts Guide", under "Selling shares". I
> recommend 
> reading it.

This, I see now, is in Chapter 8, which is called Investments in the main index.

> 
> > However, Gnucash allows these splits to exist--it just
> requires you to
> > enter the split information from a different register.
> It seems to me that
> > either you should be allowed to enter a cash split
> line in a register--or
> > not. This "You can't do it here, but you might be able
> to do it from over
> > there" interface is very very very very confusing. 
> 
> It might be, if that were true, but it isn't.

Um, the example in 8.7.1 clearly shows a line (the 1600.00 buy line below) with 0 shares and 0 price. In MY copy of Gnucash (2.3.17 on Mac OS X), I cannot do this in the SYMBOL register. Every time I attempt to do this and tab or enter off the split, the dollar amount is "helpfully" removed from the line and a new line is added to the transaction for Imbalance-USD.

If, instead I simply enter 1600 (the dollar amount) in the buy column of this line, Gnucash "helpfully" provides 1600 shares priced at 1 each.

As I stated originally, this is not good.

I will check to see whether this is the same in stable; if this is new behavior in 2.3.17, then hooray! I've found my first bug in the development release!

Account	                Shares	Price	Buy	Sell
Assets:Bank	 	 	3525.00	 
Assets:Stock:SYMBOL	-100	36.00	 	3600.00
Assets:Stock:SYMBOL	0	0	1600.00	 
Income:Capital Gains	 	 	 	1600.00
Expenses:Commissions	 	 	75.00