Advanced Portfolio Report

[Chris Good]

This is all rather ambiguous, but I think I disagree. I'm not an accountant so I'm happy to be corrected... I'm in Australia BTW.

IMHO dividends should be included in Income on the report.
If you are in a DRP, then any dividend you spend on new shares, should be included in 'Money In' and the 'Cost Basis'. Effectively you are spending your dividend on new shares, so you're definitely putting money in.

Regards, Chris Good

> 
> Message: 9
> Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2014 20:01:03 -0500
> From: Mike Alexander <mta at umich.edu>
> To: Richard Ullger <rullger at gmail.com>, gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Subject: Re: Advanced Portfolio Report
> Message-ID: <A9CEC509181277198C7909AD at bayswater.msalexander.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
> 
> --On February 11, 2014 5:52:48 PM +0000 Richard Ullger 
> <rullger at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> In my mind, money in is money used for share purchases that I have put
>> in myself (capital employed) and does not include dividend or interest
>> income. I would expect it to include charges for the original purchase
>> but not for the dividend reinvestment, where charges are paid from the
>> dividend. So money in would be the total purchase price of my original
>> investment and any subsequent investment not derived from dividend
>> income. Dividend/interest income can be identified as money entered
>> into a stock account containing a split to a sub-account of the
>> income top level account. Money in can be identified as the money
>> used in a stock account purchase that is not entered against the
>> stock account as income. Taking the above dividend reinvestment
>> transaction as an example (I have excluded some of the sub-account
>> levels for brevity), income would be ?374.92, money in would be
>> ?0.00.
>> 
>> Recorded as one transaction:
>> 
>> Asset:Broker:Stock Account - 366.95 (Buy)
>> Expenses:Commission - 3.66 (Buy)
>> Expenses:Stamp Duty - 1.83 (Buy)
>> Asset:Broker:Cash - 372.44 (Sell)
>> Income:Dividend Income - 374.92 (Sell)
>> Asset:Broker:Cash - 374.92 (Buy)
> 
> The version I'm working on handles this more or less the way you 
> suggest, I think.  If the two new options are set to ignore money in or 
> out to parent and sibling accounts and to ignore brokerage fees it 
> seems ok, with perhaps one exception.  Income is shown as 2.48 which is 
> the portion that was not reinvested.  I did it this way to avoid double 
> counting things.  The reinvested dividend goes into the value of the 
> stock so shows up as unrealized gain (depending on what happens to the 
> price).  If you also include it in income then it will be in total 
> return twice.  It's more accurate, I think, to include it in unrealized 
> gain since that will reflect price changes since the dividend was 
> reinvested.
> 
> Does this make any sense?  Do you have a suggestion for a better way to 
> handle it?
> 
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