Accounting question: Switching retirement account managers

[Christopher Singley]

On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 10:22 AM, David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com
> wrote:

> On 10/13/2013 2:27 PM, Michael DeBusk wrote:
> > On 2013-10-12 20:47, David Carlson wrote:
> >
> >> If you just do as you are suggesting,  using the corresponding prices
> >> for the sale and purchase, your cost basis, if it matters, remains the
> >> same, does it not?
> >
> > It would, but it seems to me that the unrealized capital gains would
> > show up in reports as income for this year. It wouldn't break anything
> > in the real world, I suppose.
> >
> >
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>
> To be precisely accurate, you should adjust for the realized capital
> gain/loss as outlined in the GnuCash documentation in your sale
> transactions, but I think that you can enter an offsetting realized
> capital loss/gain in your purchase transactions, effectively setting the
> round trip net realized gain/loss to zero and restoring your previous
> cost basis.  I think that will also put correct numbers into your
> reports.  If you happen to run a balance report for a date during that
> gap, you would just see a cash balance in that brokerage account.
>
> Since the realized capital gains and losses add up to zero, it would
> probably not hurt to omit both.
>
> Unrealized gains or losses usually do not appear in income reports,
> unless you specifically configure your data to show them.
>
> David C
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One problem with attempting to render the transfer as sale/repurchase
transaction is that, even if you adjust to zero out realized profit/loss,
you will be resetting the holding period of the assets, thus potentially
changing the character of future realized gains from long-term to
short-term.  This shouldn't matter for retirement plans (which ignore gains
& only tax distributions, in general) but it can matter quite a bit for
taxable accounts.

Does GnuCash not have a transfer transaction type?  Sale/repurchase is a
brittle kludge.

OP could also just directly adjust the share count via a share split,
keeping the same basis & holding period without any gain realization - much
cleaner books, I'd think.

And sorry - can you tell me where to configure my reports to show
unrealized gains & losses?  GAAP not tax income can be pretty important
sometimes.

Thanks!