Mutual fund cost basis changes between 2.6.6 and 2.6.19

[John Ralls]

> On Jan 12, 2018, at 9:43 PM, Deva - <pobox.deva at outlook.in> wrote:
> 
> Thanks John.
> 
> I haven’t filed a bug/enhancement before - GnuCash has been wonderful as it is! I will look into how to do this and add the use case as you suggested.
> 
> In the meantime, should I downgrade to 2.6.11 (last version where cost basis is correctly reported)? The reason I upgraded was because I saw some post on the list stating that if I upgrade to Mac OS High Sierra, then GnuCash needs to be at 2.6.19. So I upgraded GnuCash in preparation of the Mac OS upgrade.
> 
> If I downgrade to 2.6.11, will it be compatible with Mac OS High Sierra?
> 
> I don’t say it enough - this community’s immense support is deeply appreciated. Not just on technical aspects, I have gotten so many good ideas on accounting concepts as well, just by reading through other’s posts. Many thanks to all of you for your timely help!
> 
> Cheers.
>> On 12-Jan-2018, at 8:44 PM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us <mailto:jralls at ceridwen.us>> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Jan 12, 2018, at 3:43 AM, Deva - <pobox.deva at outlook.in <mailto:pobox.deva at outlook.in>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hello,
>>> 
>>> I am on Mac OS Sierra v10.12.6.
>>> 
>>> Until a few days ago, I was using GnuCash 2.6.6 and just in the last 2 days, I upgraded to the latest version 2.6.19.
>>> 
>>> After running a preliminary test of some of the reports I use for tax reporting purposes, I noticed that the cost basis on one of my mutual funds has changed significantly (see attached screenshot for the transactions on that mutual fund account).
>>> 
>>> Some history on this fund. It used to be called Fidelity Flexi Gilt Fund and I had invested INR 850,000 and accumulated 70,362.427 shares as of 16-Nov-12. But on 23-Nov-2012, Fidelity sold its mutual fund business in India to L&T Mutual Fund and the latter decided to merge Fidelity’s gilt fund into its own - now called L&T Gilt Fund.
>>> 
>>> When this merger happened, I simply used the stock split assistant to reduce the no. of shares by 34,769.081 based on the account statement sent by L&T.
>>> 
>>> As of 2.6.6, the (average) cost basis on the balance sheet report correctly showed INR 850,000 even after the “stock split” transaction. But in the latest version 2.6.19, the balance sheet report shows the same cost basis as 429,978.69. I think it has reduced the cost basis by the cost of the shares reduced from the merger i.e., 34,769.081 shares.
>>> 
>>> This is causing such differences to show up as imbalance in my reports!
>>> 
>>> Has the computation of cost basis changed between these versions? If so, how should I go about accounting for cases such as above to maintain proper cost basis?
>>> 
>>> Odd thing though is that I have a no. of stocks that declared a stock split, but in those cases, the cost basis is correctly maintained even after the split. This behaviour is only seen in mutual fund shares (as far as I can tell).
>>> 
>>> I rely on GnuCash reports for my annual tax reporting, so it’s important that the reports I generate have a proper explanation for the numbers shown.
>>> 
>>> Thanks in advance for your time.
>> 
>> Yes, the calculation of average cost changed in 2.6.12 to fix a bug, but that opened another can of worms, see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=775368 <https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=775368>. I intend to have a solution for 3.0 and if you can add the details of your use-case to the bug that will help.

The issue with 2.6.17 and earlier on High Sierra is a mismatched version of libz. You can work around it on the earlier versions by copying /usr/lib/libz.1.dylib to Gnucash.app/Contents/Resources/lib. That’s more easily done from the command line as Finder prefers not to show either /usr or the inside of app bundles, though it can be coerced to.

Note as well that you can have both 2.6.11 and 2.6.19 on a Mac. Either rename one of the bundles or keep them in separate directories.

Regards,
John Ralls