Capital Gains Advice

[Mike Alexander]

--On February 3, 2011 12:35:15 PM -0800 "David T." 
<sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I haven't had a chance to try this out yet, but I wonder: is there a
> situation when a commodity sale would NOT need to scrub lots and
> generate a Gain/Loss transaction? If there are no exceptions, then
> perhaps the scrubbing could be incorporated directly into the sale
> process...

There are cases in which the scrub function doesn't do the right thing, 
or at least not what you might want it to do.  Making it automatic is 
probably not a good idea.

> I also see in the Wiki that the scrub function uses FIFO; I believe
> that there are times when LIFO or other methods are used. Is this
> something that would need to be accommodated in any reconception of
> commodity sales?

This is a good idea.  In general it should be possible to specify which 
lots are being sold.  No one is currently working on this so far as I 
know.

>
> Finally, http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Concept_of_Lots explains that
> Gnucash creates these lots; is this reflected in the data file at
> all, or does Gnucash calculate these on the fly?

Lots are recorded in the data file, but not until they are needed by 
scrub or something else.  This also could be generalized.

           Mike