[GNC] Need better documentation - and maybe more robust functionality - on using Lots

[Art Chimes]

I'm sort-of hijacking an old subject line rather than its thread, but
here's what I've been perusing the past hour or so:
https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2015-September/061855.html

I started buying shares of a company (let's say GE) 20+ years ago, at
first in their DRIP plan, which was the only way I could do
dollar-cost averaging purchases ($200 a month) and also reinvesting
quarterly dividends. The downside is that over time, you end up with a
lot of transactions and significant bookkeeping overhead. But that's
what computers are for, right?

At one point I sold 300 shares. To reduce the capital gains tax on
this transaction, I specified to my broker the shares to be sold.
Specifically, the ones with the highest basis, to minimize the taxable
gain. For U.S. taxpayers, that's one of several ways you can calculate
gain when selling only part of an asset like shares of stock or mutual
fund. (I think FIFO is the default, and there are others.)

I have been spending the past six months trying to migrate from
Quicken (2000 Basic edition) to Gnucash for a variety of reasons, but
mainly because its use of double-entry, support of multiple
currencies, the open source model, multi-platform, etc. -- generally
it seems a more grown-up program. There is a steep learning curve,
however, and with about two decades of financial records to import, it
has not been a trivial task.

Today, I started tackling the sale of those 300 GE shares in 2012,
distributed among 27 individual lots purchased between 1996 and 2004.
I thought I was making good progress, using the "View Lots" function.
As has been noted before, the documentation is not very comprehensive.
There may be a circular reason for this: it's a complex corner of the
program that most users will never need. And if you do need to use it,
the documentation at the nitty-gritty level probably isn't
particularly useful, so instead maybe you boot up LibreOffice Calc and
keep track of your lots that way.

I think I have figured out how to put 26 of the 27 purchase lots that
I sold into that 2012 sales lot -- I don't know that those are the
official terms, but I think you understand what I mean -- but the 27th
lot consists of only *some* of the shares bought in that particular
transaction. (You can't usually sell fractional shares, so I needed a
whole number of shares, not 300.072.)

I could find nothing in the documentation, of course, about how to do
this. Maybe I could take that 27th purchase and arbitrarily divide it
into two transactions: the purchase of the fraction that I would sell
in 2012, and the rest.

The other problem, which I didn't pursue enough to figure out if it
really is a problem, has to do with the company's two-for-1 stock
split in the middle of all this. Most of the shares being sold were
purchased before the split; others came after the split. As far as I
can tell, the "View Lots" module can't adjust for splits. Right now, I
have 26 of the 27 lots adding up to 149.813 shares, almost all of
which represent one-half of the shares actually sold, because of the
2:1 split.

I'm writing this long post to find out if (1) I'm missing something
and (2) if I should add an enhancement suggestion to Bugzilla.  I wish
I could code, in which case I might see what I could contribute.
Unfortunately, I'm not a programmer.

By the way, there's probably a lot of programming mojo behind the
scenes, but for the user, Quicken -- even my ancient edition --
handles this sort of transaction surprisingly smoothly. I create a
transaction to sell 300 shares. A pop-up asks if I want to take the
average cost or specify lots. I choose the Lot Identification button,
and another pop-up presents a list of existing purchase lots
(including purchase date,  price, number of shares) and a place for me
to enter how many of those shares I wish to sell. There are also
buttons to automatically select FIFO and LIFO shares, or a selection
to result in either the minimum or maximum gain. (One area where it
sometime fails, if I remember correctly, is that sometimes it stumbles
over a rounding error.)

Even if Gnucash isn't perfect, I am still in awe of the very smart
people who have taken the product this far. Thank you all.

Art