[GNC] Securities disposals: pooling (not FIFO/LIFO/average costing) for UK cgt purposes: average price and identity (GNUCash v.4.5)

[RW Jones]

[Summary of main question: can GNUCash v.4.5 operate with the UK capital 
gains tax rules on pooling requirements for determining price and identity 
of securities sold outright and/or on part disposals?]

I'm not a GNUCash user and though I've installed v.4.5 to see if there is 
a ready and obvious answer I couldn't see it, so the purpose of this post 
is to ask if any UK user knows or has a link to a possible answer.

As well as general internet searches I have *briefly* looked at the FAQ 
and the Concepts Guide section on investment sales regarding this 
question, including the Help file of the program.
The only vaguely relevant post is an old one from 2013 which doesnt supply 
an answer:
https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2013-November/051192.html

1).  The main question concerns UK capital gains tax treatment of 
securities sales including part-disposals, both as to (i) price and (ii) 
identity of securities sold.  These rules are somewhat convoluted compared 
with e.g. FIFO/LIFO/simple Average cost and are summarised at
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/shares-and-capital-gains-tax-hs284-self-assessment-helpsheet/hs284-shares-and-capital-gains-tax-2021

- the main points as I understand them being:

"From 6 April 2008 all shares of the same class, in the same company, are 
together called a "Section 104 holding". You add together the costs of 
the shares in this holding: each share in the holding is treated as if 
acquired at the same average cost.

How to identify the shares disposed of

First:  Shares acquired on the same day as the disposal (the "same day" 
rule).

Second:  Shares acquired in the 30 days following the day of disposal (the 
"bed and breakfasting" rule) provided the person making the disposal was 
resident in the UK at the time of the acquisition.

Third:  Shares in the Section 104 holding."

http://cgtcalculator.com/ handles this quite well in my experience but 
ideally if I were to use GNUCash for its portfolio manager capabilities 
I'd want to know before starting if its optional settings can be made to 
reflect those requirements and if not, if it permits the user to input a 
script or similar that does so; and if yes to that latter question, 
whether anyone has done that and can post either it or a link, since I 
have found none online.

2). as a subordinate question: can one input on investments (securities) 
purchases but also on sales, (a) broker commission and (b) governmental 
taxes (e.g. stamp duty/UK SDRT) as separate / discrete items from each 
other on top of the price for the securities themselves?  The program help 
file refers to governmental fees as an expense but offhand as a 
preliminary I could not see if e.g. total purchase costs could be input 
separately as (A) costs of the securities (price per unit x total); and 
(B) broker fees/commission; and (C) government fees/stamp duty.

http://cgtcalculator.com/ requires price etc data to be input, split this 
way, and I had assumed it was the norm, at least for UK (but what do I 
know...)


Phew!  Got there eventually!

Thanks in advance for any replies.


Regards,




Robert Jones






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