Hi, I am a very happy user of Beancount for the past six or so months. I currently use it for tracking vacation hours, shares, and crypto. Since tax reporting is almost due, I need to properly calculate PnL for my shares and crypto. This becomes extremely difficult when purchasing many lots, when transferring lots from one broker to another and when exchanging between multiple currencies.
Some further elaboration: 1. I recently had to transfer some shares from one broker account to another in order to perform a sale. Since I have purchased shares at BrokerOne many times through my employer's share savings plan, I'd prefer to not manually enter each lot to be transferred (in my example I had almost 60 lots to be transferred which would create 120 painstakingly manually entered lines of transaction). Instead I'd like to do something like the following and have the transfer use FIFO to identify the lots transferred from BrokerOne to BrokerTwo and maintaing the cost basis *and* date stamp: 2000-01-01 * "Transfer shares from BrokerOne to BrokerTwo to sell at BrokerTwo" Assets:BrokerOne -10 HOOL {} Assets:BrokerTwo 10 HOOL 2000-01-02 * "Sell shares from BrokerTwo" Assets:BrokerTwo -10 HOOL {} @ 12.00 USD Assets:Bank 120.00 USD Income:PnL The reason the date stamp would need to be maintained is so that if I had some shares at BrokerTwo already that were purchased after I purchased the shares at BrokerOne, the older shares transferred from BrokerOne would be the ones that were sold. 2. During crypto trading this becomes even more difficult to handle manually since each coin can be exchanged back and forth with a number of base coins such as BTC, ETH and LTC. Here we have to assign a cost basis and price in the local FIAT currency to each and every transaction in order to correctly calculate PnL. This is ok and can probably be automated from input scripts (I'm currently looking into that). However, there are two more issues for crypto trading: a) It is very common to transfer coins between crypto exchanges (as for my share example above), but due to the nature of crypto trading where trades happen much more frequently for different base coins, it becomes impossible to stay on top of which lot to transfer. One way of solving this is by using FIAT cost basis and price to calculate a PnL for the transfer itself and establish a new cost basis for the lot after the transfer. But this is both odd and formally wrong. b) If on day one I buy ETH for BTC at Binance, on day two I buy ETH for BTC at Poloniex, and on day three I sell ETH at Poloniex, the cost basis to be used for PnL calculations should really be the cost basis for the first ETH lot I bought, i.e. the one at Binance, and /not/ the cost basis for the lot at Poloniex. These two issues can be solved by lumping the accounts together as one. I.e. instead of having both Assets:Crypto:Binance and Assets:Crypto:Poloniex, I have just Assets:Crypto. Any transfer can be ignored (except for transfer fees), and FIFO is properly maintained. The problem with this is that I lose track of how much I have at each exchange. My current approach to solving these problems is to have two separate Beancount files. One contains each exchange account and includes transfers between them in order to give me an overview of where my coins are located. I can choose whether to use FIAT cost basis or not, depending on how I want to represent the values. The other file lumps all the brokers together into one so that I can calculate PnL correctly. This two-file solution is less than ideal, and I am looking for alternatives. Does anyone have any suggestions? If I may pose a suggestion myself for a modification (perhaps a plugin?) that may solve all these problems: What if it were possible to link/group exchange accounts in such a way that their holdings/values are reported per account, but their lots are considered lumped together? When transferring from one account to another in the same group, the lots don't change at all (except for the transfer fee), but when selling lots (i.e. any transaction that transfer from the group to outside the group), the default or account-specific booking method is used. This would probably require a new keyword to link accounts together, something like: 2017-01-01 open Assets:Crypto:Binance:BTC BTC 2017-01-01 open Assets:Crypto:Binance:ETH ETH 2017-01-01 open Assets:Crypto:Poloniex:BTC BTC 2017-01-01 open Assets:Crypto:Poloniex:ETH ETH ; List all accounts to be linked on one line: 2017-01-01 link Assets:Crypto:Binance:BTC Assets:Crypto:Poloniex:BTC 2017-01-01 link Assets:Crypto:Binance:ETH Assets:Crypto:Poloniex:ETH Alternatively link on higher account levels: 2017-01-01 open Assets:Crypto:BTC:Binance BTC 2017-01-01 open Assets:Crypto:ETH:Binance ETH 2017-01-01 open Assets:Crypto:BTC:Poloniex BTC 2017-01-01 open Assets:Crypto:ETH:Poloniex ETH 2017-01-01 link Assets:Crypto:BTC ; implies "link Assets:Crypto:BTC:Binance Assets:Crypto:BTC:Poloniex Assets:Crypto:BTC:whatever" 2017-01-01 link Assets:Crypto:ETH It may actually be better to just link a commodity across Assets (and Assets only): 2017-01-01 commodity BTC linked: "true" ; or simply 2017-01-01 commodity BTC "linked" 2017-01-01 open Assets:Crypto:Binance BTC,ETH 2017-01-01 open Assets:Crypto:Poloniex:BTC BTC 2017-01-01 open Assets:Crypto:Poloniex:ETH ETH Any thoughts? If these issues can already be handled in Beancount, please let me know how. Cheers, Einar -- 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 beancount+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to beancount@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/2ca8ea71-90c0-4d41-925d-4753258b6125%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.