[GNC] Proper Way to Record Capital Gains/Losses?

[Dustin Henning]

Up until about 6 months ago, I was running an old 2.x version of 
GnuCash, but when I upgraded from Win7 to MacOS Big Sur, I also upgraded 
GnuCash, and I'm currently running 4.9.  Yesterday, I went to record my 
first capital gain/loss transaction since that move, and I found that 
the method I am using no longer works.  I thought I started using the 
method I was previously using based on documentation and/or advice from 
here, but that may not be the case.

Historically, I have posted two separate transactions in the stock/fund 
account.

The first transaction was a normal transaction removing the number of 
shares sold from the stock/fund account and adding the amount of 
currency received to the brokerage account, so in a theoretical 
transaction selling 10 shares @ $10 with a $1 commission, the split 
would look like this (using - for null fields):

Account    Shares    Price    Buy    Sell
Stock      10        9.9      -      99
Brokerage  -         -        99     -

The second transaction was only to tie the capital gain to the 
stock/fund account, and it would look like this for a $10 short term 
gain (again using - for null fields):

Account Shares    Price    Buy    Sell
Stock      -         -        10     -
STCG       -         -        -      10

The buy/sell columns would be reversed for a loss.  IIRC, all I had to 
do in order to enter this transaction in 2.x was remove a default 1 from 
one of the columns, but there is no longer a default 1 to remove and the 
stock/fund side of the split always calculates for the Shares and Price 
columns in this scenario (I don't even see a way to bypass that when 
entering from the relevant capital gain/loss account).  As I can't 
figure out a way to enter a transaction like this in 4.9, I assume the 
method I have used historically is incorrect.  I noticed that the Shares 
and Price columns don't calculate on both sides of the split if I 
accidentally use the same account on both sides, so I thought maybe I 
could merge the two transactions moving forward, but it seems those 
columns do calculate on both split entries for the stock/fund account 
when I try to set it up as a four way split.

The good news is my old transactions don't break when I look at them, 
but I need a path forward regardless of whether or not I need to adjust 
past transactions.  Assuming the behavior I'm dealing with isn't a bug 
(and I've been doing this wrong), could someone advise on how I should 
do this moving forward or point me at the correct documentation?