[GNC] More Fun with Lots

[David T.]

Hello,

Having now fiddled with the Lots features some more, I have encountered 
some issues with its implementation.

First, if I open up the lots viewer to see what it is doing with lot 
allocations, the interface appears to automatically recalculate the gain 
in the entire account, and it does this silently when you simply click 
on a given lot (e.g., to see its allocation). I discovered this issue 
because I was attempting to clean up several accounts in which a stock 
split had occurred at some point in the past, and for which I still had 
active holdings. Attempting to adjust the transaction for the stock 
split to account for an adjusted cost basis caused all gains to become 
adjusted--even ones that had been manually entered to match my 
institution's accounting.

Second, I am having troubles with the Scrub feature. While manually 
assigning a sale to a particular lot, when I clicked Scrub (not Scrub 
Account) I found that the viewer would automagically assign subsequent 
transactions to the lot--even though I had specifically assigned only 
particular transactions to a lot. For example, I have one account where 
I had two purchases (i.e., two lots), followed by a partial sale (which 
could be assigned wholly to the first lot with remaining shares in that 
lot), followed by a reverse split, followed by another sale. For reasons 
that were not clear, when I assigned the first sale manually to a 
particular lot and then clicked Scrub, the subsequent transaction for 
the reverse split kept getting added to the lot. It appears that the 
scrub function insists on adding all subsequent share transactions to 
the lot. Given that there is no way to process the lot without using the 
Scrub in one of its forms, the user is left having to either delete all 
subsequent transactions and reconstruct the account step by step, or 
abandon the lots altogether for that account. This leaves the user with 
the unfortunate situation of having to remember which accounts use lots, 
and which don't.

I am not sure how best to proceed for my own accounts; I generally like 
the lots features, and hope to find a way to use them even in this 
particular use case. I welcome suggestions.

Best,

David