On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 10:59 PM, Justus Pendleton <[email protected]>
wrote:
> I have an investment where I don't know the cost basis and I'm not sure
> how to correctly handle it in beancount.
>
> I have an Australian supernannuation account that had contributions made
> fortnightly over the period of a decade. The superannuation fund is
> essentially a unit trust. I know how many units I have and they publish the
> price once a day on their website. The cost basis isn't relevant for
> Australian Tax Office purposes since withdrawals are taxed like in an
> American 401(k). So I initially set things up like...
>
> 2017-01-11 * "Initialising First State Super account"
> Assets:AUS:First-State-Super 93,639.814336 FSS_INTL @ 1.511152 AUD
> Equity:Opening-Balances
>
That's incorrect; you're using a price conversion ("@" syntax) in lieu of
cost basis tracking
You need to use "{}" syntax instead
>
> After using beancount for a while, I've slowly realised that this causes a
> few things to not work quite right. Or at least not as I expected. For
> instance, this asset doesn't get included in the networth report because
> there is no book value. It gets included in the cash report because it has
> no book value. In fava's balance sheet display, it is listed in the "Other"
> column as 93,639 FSS_INTL instead of being converted to AUD or USD.
>
I don't know about Fava's reporting, but this may have to do with the
absence of price directives.
Do you have price directives to provide conversion rate?
If not, can you use the implicit_prices plugin?
If there's an available price, cash (if you're using the price conversion
it thinks "FSS_INTL" is like cash) should have some converted value and not
be reported as 0.
> I realise I could just give it a cost basis of $0 and treat it as a single
> lot. Of course, if I do that then padding doesn't work. (Expenses get
> subtracted every month and I currently just handle that by doing a pad
> entry every year or so.)
>
> Is that the best/only option I have?
>
If you have the AUD amount deducted from your paycheck and the number of
units of the funds added, you can omi the cost (in the {} syntax) and
Beancount should be able to calculcate that automatically
>
> Thanks again for making beancount!
> Justus
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "Beancount" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> email to [email protected].
> To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/
> msgid/beancount/77facaac-bf4b-4ac4-b795-51bcec9b4c3c%40googlegroups.com
> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/77facaac-bf4b-4ac4-b795-51bcec9b4c3c%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>
> .
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
>
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Beancount" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAK21%2BhPna-wDY-MvB2ADEnqDRW_GdVM2vdrd%3DanqewyS%2B70pCw%40mail.gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
