Mutual fund reinvestment option

[John Ralls]

> On May 23, 2015, at 10:28 PM, David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 5/23/2015 10:41 PM, John Ralls wrote:
>>> On May 23, 2015, at 6:18 PM, Divakar R. <divakar07 at dataone.in> wrote:
>>> 
>>> How else should the transaction be recorded? As I understand, 600 comes
>>> in as income and 600 is added to the investment account. Even if I enter
>>> a single line transaction in Assets:Investments:Mutual Fund:Fund_A as
>>> 
>>> Transfer:Income:Mutual Fund:Fund_A Shares 18.296: Price 32.7941: Buy 600,
>>> 
>>> the split looks as I have indicated in earlier mail.
>>> 
>>> I seem to be missing something here and am not able to get this right.
>> You need four transactions, which you can do as one or two transactions at your pleasure, though if you’re using the Advanced Portfolio Report there are some subtleties that I don’t know about since I don’t use it.
>> 
>> The splits, when viewed in Assets:Investments:Mutual Fund:Fund_A, which should be of type FUND or STOCK:
>> 						Shares	Price	  Buy	  Sell
>> Income:Mutual Fund:Fund_A		  				   600
>> Assets:Brokerage Account:Cash					  600
>> Assets:Brokerage Account:Cash						   600
>> Assets:Investments:Mutual Fund:Fund_A     	18.296	32.7941	  600
>> 
>> I usually record these as two transactions, one for the dividend and one for the repurchase.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
>> 
>> 
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> 
> I am still confused by what Divakar R. wrote in his first post.  I think
> that he stated that he entered the equivalent of the first and fourth
> lines that John explained above, and that the omission of the the second
> and third lines caused blanks in the register displays of the security
> and parent accounts.  I have not seen that in my data file.  In fact,
> the section of the Tutorial describing how to enter a dividend
> reinvestment does omit the second and third lines.   What would the
> omission of the two middle lines actually cause?

It shouldn’t make any difference to GnuCash, it just illustrates what Alice is talking about that there are two separate events, the receipt of the dividend and its reinvestment.

When I try it in a test account it behaves as expected, so there must be something else going on. I tried fiddling the currencies, so that the reinvested dividend was in a different one from the base currency and it still worked, though without trading accounts the double-conversion (from the dividend currency to the base and from the base to the fund) isn’t visible, the amount of shares comes out right and displays in the register and CoA. Divarkar’s headings are correct for a stock/fund account in split view, so that’s not the problem either.

Regards,
John Ralls