[GNC] Tutorial for moving stock between accounts?

[Jon Leech]

On Tue, Jan 01, 2019 at 10:35:03AM +0000, David T. wrote:
> What part of creating a transaction that moves shares from the old account to the new account does not work? It would seem to me that:
> Old account decrease 100 shares
> New account add shares
> Would work just fine.

    Could you give a bit more detail? The way I know to 'decrease' or
'increase' shares is by Selling or Buying them in a split transaction,
which also involves a cash account from which fees or proceeds are
handled. But here the shares are moving between accounts, and no cash is
involved.

    Maybe a framework for this is to say that I want to adjust the share
count in the two security accounts in much the same way I adjust the
cash value in two cash accounts - by moving the underlying commodity
(shares or cash, respectively) between them.

    It might be more clear what I'm trying to accomplish, and why I'm
stymied, if I show a couple of screenshots of a failed attempt. Attached
src.jpg is of an account containing 33 shares of CEG (let's leave aside
that the security no longer exists - this is only for demonstration
purposes). dst.jpg shows another account denominated in the same
security, and I'd like to transfer 13 of those 33 shares to it.

    Just to get the share counts correct, it seemed obvious to enter a
transaction where I Transfer from the src to dst account, and enter a
negative number of shares. This *does* adjust the share count correctly
on the src side, but on the dst side (dst.gif) instead of showing a
number of *shares* transferred, it shows a 'Buy' of 13.00 and zero
resulting shares.

    I have also attempted to do this with a split, but (a) AFAICT
there's no 'Action' in a split that relates to transferring shares
between accounts - there are 'Sell', 'Buy', 'Fee', things related to
dividends and capital gains, etc. - and (b) it insists on forcing a
monetary Price on the transaction which makes the split imbalanced, even
though no money whatsoever is involved.

    So this is why I'm hoping to find an actual detailed example of how
to accomplish this transfer in the gnucash framework. I appreciate the
responses, but none of it quite seems to speak to the thing I'm trying
to accomplish - or I don't yet understand what people are saying I
should do.

    Jon
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: src.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 37028 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/attachments/20190101/5ebf9c13/attachment-0002.gif>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: dst.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 32043 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/attachments/20190101/5ebf9c13/attachment-0003.gif>