[GNC] Using the advanced portfolio report for mutual fund income

Deva - pobox.deva at outlook.in
Tue May 11 04:19:40 EDT 2021


I'm glad to hear that your problem is resolved.

Copying the list for the benefit of millenials (pre and post)...

Cheers,
Deva


Sent from Outlook<http://aka.ms/weboutlook>

________________________________
From: Alister Briggs <alister58 at gmail.com>
Sent: 10 May 2021 17:59
To: pobox.deva at outlook.in <pobox.deva at outlook.in>
Subject: Re: [GNC] Using the advanced portfolio report for mutual fund income


Hello Deva,

In fixing the problem with this report I am reminded of a quote from Winston Churchill in the early days of the second world war "Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted". I have done the same in respect to this GnuCash report. If I'd followed every step of your advice it would have been fixed much more quickly. Things started to go wrong when I entered the bank transaction into the staging account before entering each fund distribution. The transaction order entry in the staging account seems to be important. After that failure and several more my efforts faded. Then I read your email again and Eureka ... it works!

I apologise for the lateness of my response, and thank you for your advice.

Best regards

Alister


On 5/09/2020 4:31 pm, pobox.deva at outlook.in<mailto:pobox.deva at outlook.in> wrote:
Alister,

I had a similar problem when I recorded multiple stock buys in a single transaction covering over a dozen splits to account for purchases in different stock accounts along with its attendant brokerage and statutory levies. Advanced portfolio report would show incorrect brokerage amounts in that case.

The way I got around it was to create a dummy asset account (called $Cash in my case, but you can call it "Broker" or "Suspense” or “Staging” account, etc.). This is a dummy asset account that acts as a staging account - a sort of a bridge between fund/stock accounts and your bank account. This account is of simple type Asset (not Mutual Fund or Stock). And it can reside under the main “Investments” asset account. For example -

Assets:Investments:$Cash
Assets:Investments:Mutual Fund:Fund1
Assets:Investments:Mutual Fund:Fund2
.
.
. and so on...
Assets:Investments:Stocks:Stock1
Assets:Investments:Stocks:Stock2
.
.
. and so on...

The idea is, $Cash will always be a zero balance account after your record all your transactions.

With this structure in place, you can record multiple distributions from your fund house as if they were single distributions on each fund (as you stated in example 1), but instead of depositing your bank account, you would deposit your $Cash staging account instead. After recording your $75 distribution from fund 1 and $25 distribution from fund 2 in the respective fund accounts, you would now have a balance of $100 in your $Cash (staging) account.

Now from your $Cash account, record a single transaction to move $100 from it to your bank account. This will bring your $Cash account back to 0.

$Cash account will not be visible if you have your settings to hide zero balance accounts, so you have to change that setting for you to use $Cash account every time.

Cheers,
Deva

On 04-Sep-2020, at 9:30 PM, gnucash-user-request at gnucash.org<mailto:gnucash-user-request at gnucash.org> wrote:

Date: Fri, 4 Sep 2020 15:02:55 +1000
From: Alister Briggs <alister58 at gmail.com<mailto:alister58 at gmail.com>>
To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org<mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
Subject: [GNC] Using the advanced portfolio report for mutual fund
income
Message-ID: <03a772fd-0aac-e623-69b0-ffe51c387f99 at gmail.com<mailto:03a772fd-0aac-e623-69b0-ffe51c387f99 at gmail.com>>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed

Can anybody help me work around a problem using the Advanced Portfolio
Report to report income on mutual funds where a single payment is made
for multiple funds? The Advanced Portfolio report requires atransaction
split to include a dummy transaction of zero value as shown below:

Scenario 1 - A single distribution payment per fund

Direct Credit CFS Distribution







100



100



Assets: Bank: CBA



100







Income: Mutual Funds: CFS: Fund1





100





Assets: Investments: Fund managers: CFS: Fund1



0



0











In this situation the Advanced Portfolio Report correctly reports the
income for Fund1 as $100.

Where more than one fund is paid the split becomes more complicated:


Scenario 2 - A single distribution payment for two funds

Direct Credit CFS Distribution







100



100



Assets: Bank: CBA



100







Income: Mutual Funds: CFS: Fund1





75





Assets: Investments: Fund managers: CFS: Fund1



0



0





Income: Mutual Funds: CFS: Fund2





25





Assets: Investments: Fund managers: CFS: Fund2



0



0



In this situation the Advanced Portfolio Report incorrectly reports the
income for both Fund1 and Fund2 as $100. How do I correct this so the
result for Fund1 is $75 and Fund2 is $25?

I am using GnuCash 4.1 on Windows 10 and fairly new user.


Thank you for your efforts

Alister




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