Chapter 8 - investment accounts

Mike Alexander mta at umich.edu
Sun Feb 1 21:55:29 EST 2015


--On February 1, 2015 at 9:54:00 AM -0800 John Ralls 
<jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:

> There *is* another way: Open the stock account and select
> Actions>View Lots... from the menu. Click "Scrub Account" on the
> bottom of the resulting dialog box. That will automatically create a
> separate capital gains transaction in the account. However, it has a
> few drawbacks:

> - the capital gains account is hard-coded to "Orphan Gains -- XXX"
> where XXX is the transaction currency in (I think) the sale
> transaction.
>
> - It only does FIFO which if there's  more than one purchase might
> result in a different basis and therefor a different gain than what
> your broker reports to the tax authorities.
>
> - It can get confused if you buy some stock, sell part of it, then
> buy more and sell all or part; the lot-allocation code isn't quite
> general enough to handle all possible variations on this.

I discovered recently that there is a way to get around some of these 
drawbacks.  If you open the View Lots window and expand the bottom pane 
(it seems to be shrunk to zero height by default) you'll get "Splits 
free" and "Splits in lot" areas with arrow buttons between them.  If 
you select a lot in the top half of the window you can then use the 
arrow buttons to move a sell split into that lot.  This seems to 
calculate capital gains as if that sale went against the lot selected. 
This seems to be a way to override the strict FIFO ordering of sales.

You can also change the income account split of the capital gains 
transaction from "Orphan Gains - XXX" to anything else after the fact. 
Not ideal, but it works.

This is all in the current GIT version of GnuCash, but I don't think 
any of this has been changed real recently.

            Mike
 


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