[GNC] More Fun with Lots

[Geoff]

Yes David there are some "interesting" behaviours within the Lot Viewer, 
however with patience and perseverance you should be able to master it, 
and one day you will sit back and wonder what all the fuss was about.

I have successfully used Lots for all sorts of corporate actions 
including returns of capital, fractional consolidations, demergers, 
dividend reinvestments, and partial sales spanning multiple lots.  It 
can be relied upon to calculate the correct capital gains/losses on each 
lot.  One of my accounts has over 200 lots in it.  The only weakness I 
have encountered is that it doesn't include brokerage and other charges, 
and there is a workaround for this (nett pricing).

Here are some tips:
Read (and re-read) this excellent guide: 
https://codesmythe.gitbooks.io/gnucash-guide/content/en/ch_invest.html. 
The team that wrote it deserve a medal!

NEVER EVER click on "Scrub Account" - unless you have a simple series of 
Buys & Sells that you are happy to treat on a FIFO basis.

Start with a blank slate.  Everything the Lot Viewer does is completely 
reversible.  Delete all of the "Realized Gain/Loss" transactions it 
creates in your register, and then delete all the Lots it created by 
selecting them one at a time and hitting the Delete button in the Lot 
Viewer.

Manually create a new Lot for each of your "Buy" splits:
(1) Use the "New Lot" button
(2) Select the newly created Lot (in the top panel)
(3) Select the "Buy" split (in the bottom left panel)
(4) Hit the ">>" button.

Manually allocate all of your "Sell" splits to your newly created Lots:
(1) Select the "Buy" Lot (in the top panel)
(2) Select the correct "Sell" split(s) (in the bottom left panel)
(4) Hit the ">>" button - this is the magic step that calculates the 
Gain/Loss and creates a corresponding "Realized Gain/Loss" transaction 
in the register.

Resist the temptation to click on the "Scrub" button.

Review all the "Realized Gain/Loss" transactions in the register. 
Replace the default description with some details of the Sale (eg cut 
and paste the description from the Sale transaction).

DELETE the "Orphaned Gains-XXX" account and move its transactions to 
your regular Capital Gains / Losses accounts.

Rinse and repeat.


Good luck!

Geoff
=====

On 26/08/2020 12:44 am, David T. via gnucash-user wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
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