OFX transaction dilemma

[Edward Doolittle]

I don't know anything about QFX/OFX nor Quicken, but I do find the whole
situation puzzling. If you have too much cash in an account, the cash must
have come from somewhere (at least as far as GnuCash is concerned; I don't
know about Quicken). What do the transactions look like in GnuCash? You
describe the end result of some of your accounts but the actual
transactions are not clear to me from your message. Perhaps I'm missing
something.

The only way I can see the situation you describe happening in GnuCash is
if something like the transactions

cr: Income:Dividend $50.00
dr. Investments:Brokerage:Cash $50.00

cr. Income:Dividend $50.00
dr. Investments:Brokerage:HoldingB 6

both appear, which is clearly wrong. What you want is:

cr: Income:Dividend $50.00
dr. Investments:Brokerage:Cash $50.00

cr. Investments:Brokerage:Cash $48.00
dr. Investments:Brokerage:HoldingB 6

or the more sophisticated version using splits, but that is perhaps too
much to ask at the present time and could lead to confusion (see below).

Unless exactly that information (or a mapping of that information, say,
with account names changed) is contained in the QFX/OFX file, you're going
to have trouble when you import. Can you post a fragment of a QFX file?

A simple, straightforward way to model the situation might be to run
everything through the cash account. Dividends get paid into cash, sales
are made into cash, and buys are made from cash. The cash account should
appear as a leg in every transaction. That seems to work for interpreting
brokerage CSV files which only have one leg of a transaction per line, with
the other leg missing, so it might work for constructing/interpreting QFX
files as well.


On 6 February 2015 at 17:12, harphauler <hurst.lou at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think I became too verbose with my question and explanation.
>
> I don't have a problem with the how of dealing with a dividend reinvest
> transaction.  I think of it as two separate transactions, a dividend income
> coming in and a buy of new shares going out thus balancing each other.  In
> our case and in my example where only an even number of new shares are
> bought we get to keep the extra $2 so our cash balance in the account has a
> net increase after reinvesting of $2.
>
> My annoyance comes from downloading the transaction.  If I just accept the
> transaction as is from the brokerage I wind up with a net cash increase in
> the amount of what should have been the buy transaction.  In my first
> example of HOLDING A I have $50 too much cash and with HOLDING B $48 too
> much.  In both examples what I wind up doing is manually editing the
> dividend payment as a split - dividend income, buy X number of new shares
> with the register showing either blank/0 for HOLDING A or $2 for HOLDING B.
> Or I manually create a separate buy for the reinvest transaction.  In
> either
> case I don't accept the buy transaction in Gnucash.  We have several of
> these transactions weekly so it gets old quickly in either Gnucash or
> Quicken doing the work manually.
>
> I'm looking for a less tedious method of dealing with the transactions I
> download; the underlying problem is in the way brokerages are required to
> present the information in their QFX/OFX files, that info has to conform to
> Intuit/Quicken's format.
>
> Thanks again!
>
>
>
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-- 
Edward Doolittle
Associate Professor of Mathematics
First Nations University of Canada
1 First Nations Way, Regina SK S4S 7K2

« Toutes les fois que je donne une place vacante, je fais cent mécontents
et un ingrat. »
-- Louis XIV, dans Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV, Chap. XXVI