[GNC] Selling specified lots of stock/mutual funds

Art Chimes artsonline at gmail.com
Mon May 27 15:53:27 EDT 2019


I have been struggling to migrate from my ancient (2000) edition of
Quicken to Gnucash. The learning curve, for me, has been
discouragingly steep. I think I've got a grasp on the cash accounts --
bank accounts, credit cards. But investments, such as a brokerage
account, are more challenging.

My current stumbling block is selling specified shares of a mutual
fund or stock.

To sell shares in Quicken -- even my dusty old version -- the program
asks me to choose between average cost basis and lot identification.
When I click the "select lots" button, a pop-up box lists all open
lots of the security with date and price. I can manually choose which
lots (or parts thereof) to sell in this transaction. Or just press a
button to automatically select oldest or newest shares, or the ones
that will give me minimum or maximum gain. (There is a Help button,
but the screen is really self-explanatory.)

By contrast, I see no parallel function in Gnucash. I can "View Lots"
from the Actions menu, and I can manually aggregate one or more
purchases into a named lot. But then what? And the pop-up lots window
does not provide crucial per-share cost data that I could potentially
sort on to minimize taxable gain. The scrub function, if I read the
documentation correction, automates the process only for FIFO
accounting. I don't see a way to manually identify the shares I want
to sell and have Gnucash calculate the gain or loss, and then mark
those lots as no longer available for sale.

Neither Section 9.7 of the Gnucash docs, or the wiki nor a search of
the mailing list archives seem to have answered my question: Am I
missing something? I'm not an active trader, and I may need this
function only a couple of times a year, but it would be very
disappointing if I have to do something like this manually. (The
examples of lots seem to involve a maximum of four transactions, but
in an account with years of dollar-cost-averaging purchases and
reinvested dividends, over a decade or two the number of transactions
can climb into triple digits.)

I'm using 3.4 on Windows 10.

Thank you,
Art


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