[GNC] Tutorial for moving stock between accounts?

[David Carlson]

Jon,

I believe that, as discussed earlier by Christopher Lam and David T,
GnuCash may not prevent you from creating a transaction containing only two
lines, one removing shares from one brokerage account and one another
adding shares to a different brokerage account, and it may even be possible
for the shares to be different securities, superficially simulating a
buyout or other unusual non-cash security transaction.  However, if one
does this without correctly accounting for the values of the shares and
security accounts involved, then one is setting himself up for
discrepancies in future reports involving the values of those security
accounts.  This is most easily seen by the example of looking at the
security accounts in the chart of accounts view.  Every security account
that is no longer used because all of the shares have been sold should not
only show 0 shares, but also show 0 current value in your currency.
Chapter 9 in the tutorial goes into great detail on how to correctly
account for the correct capital gains and losses when selling securities
and using the Trial Balance report to verify that the correct cost basis
amount is converted from unrealized into realized gain or loss.  The same
principles should be used to account for values even when no currency is
involved.

There is a little known assistant feature in GnuCash to enter stock splits
which is also documented in the tutorial chapter 9.  That assistant is
under Actions in the menu and it provides a way to assign correct values to
before and after shares when a stock is split.  The result of using that
assistant would create a model for other types of virtual transactions not
involving cash.

If you do not track the value of your securities or your net worth in
GnuCash, then it is much easier to skip all the effort to correctly account
for realized gains and losses and just forward your brokers' tax report to
your accountant.

That is my 2 cents...

David Carlson

On Wed, Jan 2, 2019 at 6:12 AM D via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
wrote:

> Jon,
>
> I can't test this right now, since I'm not at my machine...
>
> Try this:
>
> Open your source account.
>
> Move to the entry point in the register.
>
> Click the 'Split' button. Enter your description.
>
> Tab to the Shares field in the first split and type -13.
>
> Tab to the price field and type 0.
>
> Now, use **tab** to move to the Transfer field on the second line, set it
> to your destination account and tab to shares and type 13.
>
> Does that work?
>
> David T.
>
>
>
> On January 2, 2019, at 2:55 PM, Jon Leech <oddhack at sonic.net> wrote:
>
> >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
>
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