[GNC] Lot Calculator Off?

[David T.]

So, the statements that I receive from brokers, which aggregate lots into one sale/gain entry, are incomplete and don't give a full audit trail. That's frustrating. 

I use the scrub feature, but compare my results to the financial institution and pull things apart when the results are off. That's actually how I got into this mess in the first place. I've gotten rather adept at assigning sales to specific lots, since the financial institution I use makes aggressive use of specific lots to manage gains throughout the year. 

⁣David T. ​

On Dec 3, 2022, 9:12 PM, at 9:12 PM, john <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
>It's not a programming necessity, it's an auditing necessity. Each
>purchase split represents a lot and in order to track the share balance
>of each lot a sale that touches multiple lots has to have a separate
>split for each lot so that you can work out what it did by examining
>the register.
>
>It's possible that the lot scrubber screwed up--the code is old and
>torturously complex--but you didn't provide enough information for me
>to analyze that.
>
>Note also that the lot scrubber is strictly FIFO.
>
>Regards,
>John Ralls
>
>> On Dec 3, 2022, at 1:34 AM, David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> 
>> John,
>> 
>> Thanks for the reply. I went back and re-entered all of the
>transactions again and this time it (mostly) came out as you have
>indicated. Not sure how I got into the rabbit hole I was in...
>> 
>> For what it's worth, the "separate" sales were the result of the lot
>manager's splitting of a single sale into separate splits. While I
>understand the programming necessities behind this approach, it renders
>some accounts nearly incomprehensible when comparing to a financial
>institution's records, as the GnuCash user is forced to examine (and
>tally) multiple GnuCash sales and gains entries to determine whether
>the GnuCash books match the bank's. When a given transaction is split
>into two or three separate sales/gains entries, the burden is (mostly)
>manageable; when a single sale gets split into 6 or more such entries
>(as can happen with mutual funds with regularly-reinvested dividend
>entries), it is significantly more difficult to manage. Since most
>institutions simply report the aggregate sale and gain, it would be
>nice if there were a way to mimic this in GnuCash.
>> 
>> David T.
>> 
>> On 12/2/2022 9:31 PM, john wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On Dec 2, 2022, at 1:06 AM, David T. via gnucash-user
><gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Hello,
>>>> 
>>>> GnuCash 4.11 on Windows 10
>>>> 
>>>> As the end of the year approaches, I am working to get all my
>accounts up to date, and I've stumbled across an apparent error in
>capital gains calculations in the Lot manager. I am attaching a
>screenshot of the problem I am seeing. If you add up the sales prices
>and the gains, they are off from the original purchase price by $4.20.
>The second sales loss has seemingly failed to account for the first
>calculation for some reason, and the resulting amounts differ from the
>financial institution by the same $4.20.
>>>> 
>>>> Since I used the lot manager to handle all of the gains
>calculations, I'm at a loss for determining why or how I've achieved
>this erroneous result. Not sure if the table below will display
>correctly, but the numbers are there for reference.
>>>> 
>>>> Best,
>>>> 
>>>> David T.
>>>> 
>>>> 	Amount 	Gain(Loss) 	Sale with Gain/Loss 	
>>>> Purchase cost 	$ 230.96 			
>>>> Sale 1 	$ 140.15 	$(4.20) 	$ 144.35 	
>>>> Sale 2 	$78.44 	$(12.37) 	$90.81 	
>>>> 			$ 235.16 	Total
>>>> 			$(4.20) 	Difference
>>> Combining the info in the image with your table, I think you have
>three transactions:
>>> 
>>> 								Shares	Price		Debit	Credit
>>> Purchase:							        8      28.87	230.96
>>> Sale 1								5	28.03			140.15
>>> Sale 2								3	26.1467			  78.44
>>> 
>>> The loss on the first is 5 * 0.84 = 4.20 and on the second 3 *
>2.7333 = 8.17.  12.37 - 8.17 = 4.20.
>>> 12.37 / 3 = 4.1233, implying a sale price of 24.7467 and so proceeds
>of $74.24.
>>> 
>>> Check your statement or sale ticket for the second sale to see which
>number you entered wrong.
>>> 
>>> Regards,
>>> John Ralls
>>> 
>>>