Advanced Portfolio Report

[Mike Alexander]

--On January 28, 2014 12:33:09 AM +0000 Richard Ullger 
<rullger at gmail.com> wrote:

> If the income is entered as a split of a dividend reinvestment where
> you have a stock purchase, the income recorded on the report is the
> consideration of 366.95 instead of the actual income of 374.92. For
> example,
>
> Acc		Tot Buy		Tot Sell
> Stock Account	366.95
> Commission	3.66
> Stamp Duty	1.83
> Cash				372.44
> Income			374.92
> Cash		374.92

I'm working on the advanced portfolio report to try to make it handle 
this better.  It's non-trivial to fix, but I think I know how to do it. 
However, I have a question about the way these transactions are handled.

This transaction leaves 2.48 of the dividend unspent and held in the 
Cash account.  I gather that this is an account that can only be used 
to round up future dividend transactions to an integral number of 
shares.  Is this correct?  The problem is that this money will look 
like new money invested in the stock when it is used in a future 
dividend transaction, but that's not really correct.  The problem is 
even worse if you put the entire dividend into the Cash account and 
then use some of it to reinvest in a separate transaction.  Then the 
entire dividend looks like money in.  I guess the solution would be to 
somehow recognize this Cash account as special, assuming I'm 
understanding how it is used, and not count money coming from it as 
money in to the stock account.

Does any of this make sense?  Is it anything worth worrying about? 
Things are handled differently in the US so I have no direct experience 
with this.  For us, the entire dividend is always reinvested and 
generally buys a fractional share of stock.  This means there isn't any 
account like the Cash account mentioned in this sample transaction.

          Mike