Advanced Portfolio Income (maybe Brokerage Fees too) incorrect in switch and multiple investments transactions

Chris Good chris.good at ozemail.com.au
Thu Jan 12 19:33:19 EST 2017


Il 12/Gen/2017 00:57, "Chris Good" <chris.good at ozemail.com.au <mailto:chris.good at ozemail.com.au> > ha scritto:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alberto Dante [mailto:alberto.dante at gmail.com <mailto:alberto.dante at gmail.com> ]

> Sent: Thursday, 12 January 2017 6:35 AM
> To: Chris Good <chris.good at ozemail.com.au <mailto:chris.good at ozemail.com.au> >; gnucash-user at gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org> 
> Subject: Re: Advanced Portfolio Income (maybe Brokerage Fees too)
> incorrect in switch and multiple investments transactions
>

> Hi Chris,
> I'm sorry for the long delay due to end year holidays.
> Please have a look at attached files (screenshots are of the Advanced
> Portfolio reports).
> You can compare results using split transactions (wrong report results)
and
> no-split transactions (with DUMMY BANK right report results, as account
tree
> values) in the following cases:
> 1) Switch Investments (FUND 1 and 2)
> 2) Multiple Investments (FUND 3 and 4)
> 3) Reinvested dividends (FUND 5)
> I think user manuals should emphasize that split transactions must be
> avoided in order to have right Advanced Report results (for not-so-
> experienced users as me).
> I've lost many time to separate lot of split investment transactions.
> Hope this helps.
> Thanks, best regards
> Alberto
>

Hi Alberto,

OK, that sounds like a useful addition to the manual.
You're not the first to get into trouble from being too creative.

Regards, Chris Good

 

From: Alberto D [mailto:alberto.dante at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, 12 January 2017 7:19 PM
To: Chris Good <chris.good at ozemail.com.au>
Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Subject: RE: Advanced Portfolio Income (maybe Brokerage Fees too) incorrect in switch and multiple investments transactions

 

Hi Chris,

 

please note that I encountered these situations in the real life (I think I'm not so creative).

Split transactions respect real transactions, while separate transactions using Dummy Bank is a trick.

Split and separate transactions give the same values on the account register, but Advanced Investment report gives correct results just with separate transactions.

So, I think, the right way to proceed should be to make Advanced Investment report working fine with split (real) transactions too.

Modify manuals is a trick again.

This is my opinion.

 

Thanks, best regards 

Alberto Dante 

 

Hi Alberto,

 

Even though what you did mirrors your real life events (usually a good practice), there is nothing in the manuals that says you can put splits for different stocks in 1 transaction.

I intend to add that you should NOT do that if you wish to use the Advanced Portfolio Report (APR).

 

Yes it is a trick to use a dummy intermediate bank transaction to change a switch from 1 fund to another in 1 transaction to a sell in 1 transaction and a buy in another transaction,

but to be realistic, to make the APR handle multiple different stock accounts in 1 transaction would, IMHO, be a huge amount of work and the user setup required to make it work, would make it much more ungainly to use.

As there is a simple work-around, it is unlikely a developer would ever decide this was a good use of their time.

 

Of course if you could do this yourself, or were prepared to pay for some-one else to do it, that may be a different story.

 

The reason I think this would a huge amount of work, is that the APR (AFAIK) makes assumptions about what the other splits in a transactions are, depending on what type of account they are (Income or Expense etc).

If you have multiple stock accounts in a transaction, how would it know how to apportion the fees, income etc to what stock?

 

I admit I haven’t thought long about this as it is not a priority for me. If you’re a programmer and have any ideas about how to simply implement your required functionality (and still be useful to other users), please share them.

Just to be clear: Note GnuCash reports are written in Scheme and I’m only a Scheme beginner, and I’m not offering to do this work.

 

Regards, Chris Good

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