Accounting question: Switching retirement account managers

[Christopher Singley]

Sorry if I'm hijacking this thread - let me re-emphasize my suggestion to
the original poster that a stock split is likely the way to go here.


On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 7:10 AM, David Carlson
<david.carlson.417 at gmail.com>wrote:

> <snip>

GnuCash is not very convenient for tracking holding periods.  For
> infrequent events such as this, manual tracking works fine.  For day
> traders, find another program that is better suited to your purpose.
>

Just to be clear, day traders do not have issues about the character of
their capital gains - they are all short term.

The issues I am talking about are issues faced by long-term investors in
taxable accounts - who may have hundreds of different lots in a specific
securities, transfer these lots back & forth between various custodians
(with different linked cash accounts) over the years, have their cost basis
reduced many times (even to zero and beyond) by return of capital
distributions, and then make elections to change from FIFO to LIFO or
specific identification in order to manage their tax obligation when they
finally sell.  You know, the kinds of real-world activities engaged in by
serious investors who actually can benefit from automation of these common
accounting tasks, rather than manually figuring everything on a
spreadsheets with hundreds of rows and columns (which I have done some of;
it is no fun).

Doesn't anybody use GnuCash for serious work accounting for investments?
I'd be grateful for the benefit of anyone's experience, because the
foundations of the program seem quite solid and it's free software; I'd
like to use it instead of reinventing the wheel (which I've also done some
of, and reimplementing a double-entry accounting engine & TX journal GUI
isn't my idea of fun either).


> Regarding directly transferring shares, I never tried that, but since
> possible gains or losses and lot tracking are involved, it may not
> work.  You could build a test file and try it for us.  Do not try it in
> a real data file.  Perhaps others have looked at this.
>


Sure, I'll try to knock up some tests in the near future.  I am interested
in anybody's experience about more intensive work in tracking lots,
matching basis, reducing/increasing/apportioning basis, spinoffs,
transfers, reorgs, etc. etc.  You know, the messy stuff.  Any pointers to
relevant work or discussions are appreciated.


> For unrealized gains take a look at the GnuCash Tutorial and Concepts
> Guide Capital Gains section for an example of documenting unrealized
> gains.  Real world cases are probably not that simple, but it is a start.
>

Thank you, I am starting to look at this more carefully.

cs