[GNC] Lot Calculator Off?

[David T.]

Further to the issue of the lot manager splitting sales by lots: I 
attach the screenshot of GnuCash's management of the capital gains for 
one mutual fund sale. As you can see, there is a more than a full screen 
of separate gains transactions generated by the Lots Manager for this 
one sale (there are several entries offscreen). The broker lists ONE 
gain transaction and states that it's from multiple lots.

Honestly: how would anyone EVER evaluate whether the two accounting 
records match? And, if the point of GnuCash's approach is to allow the 
user to validate the broker's number, how would the user ever determine 
this? There are so many entries that it would be nearly impossible to 
determine any errors--and if a discrepancy were found, how would a user 
ever contest the results?

My point is: at this level of detail, are GnuCash users being served by 
this approach?

Best,

David T.

On 12/3/2022 10:34 PM, David T. 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> 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 
>
>
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