[GNC] Lot Calculator Off?

[john]

That's nice of your broker to pick the lots for tax efficiency, not something I've ever encountered. But the lot scrubber is strictly FIFO so if you want your gains to match your statements and perhaps more important your 1099-B you need to assign the lots manually instead of letting the scrubber do it.

Regards,
John Ralls

> On Dec 3, 2022, at 11:34 AM, David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> 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, at 9:12 PM, john <jralls at ceridwen.us <mailto: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
>>>>  
>>>>  
>>