custom separate trading accounts

[gnucash.133518b at telus.net]

On 2014-05-24 6:57 PM, Mike Alexander wrote:
> --On May 24, 2014 2:31:41 PM -0700 gnucash.133518b at telus.net wrote:
>
>>>> Notice that price of $11? You'll find in the attached file's Price
>>>> Editor that $11/share is the price for 2013-01-05 but it should be
>>>> $10/share for 2013-01-04. Am I wrong that this report should have
>>>> Price = Value / Shares?
>>>
>> I'm using GnuCash 2.6.3 for Windows "built from git rev 166cbb7+ on
>> 2014-04-01", according to About GnuCash. My time zone is PST/PDT, if
>> that matters.
>
> The time zone matters a lot.  The prices are entered as of midnight in
> your time zone.  Since my time zone is 3 hours east of you that makes
> them appear on a different date in my time zone.  The report tries to
> find a price on the same date as the report's date, so it gets a
> different price in my time zone.  When I adjusted the times to agree
> with my time zone I got output that agrees with yours.

And do you agree that the output in question is wrong? I'm not crossing 
time zones to get that report, so I don't understand why it's displaying 
the wrong Price, although I now understand why you weren't seeing the 
same output.

> There have been ongoing discussions concerning how to better handle time
> stamps so this sort of problem doesn't happen, but so long as you stick
> to one time zone things are usually ok.  It turns out to not be a simple
> problem to solve.

I trust you're storing timestamps as POSIX time values.

It might be helpful to have a GnuCash book property to allow the user to 
optionally specify an alternative time zone instead of the local time zone.

Should the timezone that applied for each transaction at time of entry 
be stored as well? That you could not deduce what time zone I created 
the book in seems like an important piece of missing data. I'm thinking 
of what I would be faced with if I began a book in one time zone and 
then moved to another time zone and continued that same book. I'm not 
sure how that should be addressed in terms of register/report display 
options, so I can see why you say it's not simple.

> The time zone issue really only affects this report for the look up of
> prices in the price DB.  If you want to use the actual transaction
> prices then uncheck "Set preference for price list data" in the report
> options.  This may give you more nearly what you want.

Wait, are you suggesting that I'm getting the wrong Price displayed 
because of a time zone issue? That would definitely be a bug in need of 
fixing as I'm not mixing time zones. You're correct that disabling "Set 
preference for price list data" fixes the report's Price, but I 
certainly shouldn't be forced to use transaction pricing because of the 
time zone I happen to be in and there should never be a situation for 
anyone in which that report gives a Value that does not equal Shares*Price.

> Remind me again of what else is wrong with this report.  I've lost track
> of the issues you've raised.

For the Advanced Portfolio report I raised no issues so far, aside from 
the wrong Price. This arose in the context of you suggesting I get ACB 
from this report instead of from the trading accounts.

Carl