On 7 May 2021, at 18:51, James Cook <[email protected]> wrote:
> I don't think I completely understand what you're doing. E.g. I'm not
> sure where 977.88 GBP comes from.
Ha, I’m not sure I do either, which is why I posted here :-)
The 977.88 GBP is my profit (984.48 GBP by selling the shares, minus 6.60 GBP
fee). It’s the actual profit I made – the amount that the purchase and
subsequent sale altered my account balance.
It’s about the only invariant here: the profit is 977.88 GBP. That must be the
outcome of whatever accounting method I use, as it is the amount of profit I
actually made.
> I'm certainly no expert, but how I would account for this depends on
> which country I'm doing my taxes for. (My plugin tries to do both at
> once, at the cost of some added complexity.)
>
> For the US, (I think) my PnL should be computed just using the USD
> amounts. So it should come out to (175.81-54.13456)*11 = 1338.43 USD.
That would make sense if my account balance was in USD and so that could be
conceived as the amount of profit I had made. But it isn’t (see above) so that
figure is somewhat illusory – the change in exchange rate wiped out a chunk of
it.
> If you want to do taxes in GBP: well, you put in 482.60 GBP and got
> back 1467.08 GBP, so your profit is 984.48 GBP.
Yes, that’s what I want to achieve (minus the 6.60 GBP fee, making the real
profit 977.88 GBP, but let’s ignore that for now for simplicity).
> Here's how you can get that:
>
> option "operating_currency" "GBP"
> option "inferred_tolerance_default" "GBP:0.005"
> option "inferred_tolerance_default" "USD:0.005"
> plugin "beancount.plugins.auto_accounts"
>
> 2020-03-31 * "Buy 11 shares of Square"
> Assets:GB:Freetrade:GIA:Cash -482.60 GBP
> Assets:GB:Freetrade:GIA:SQ 11 S_SQ {43.8727 GBP}
>
> 2020-11-16 * "Sell 11 shares of Square"
> Assets:GB:Freetrade:GIA:SQ -11 S_SQ {43.8727 GBP} @ 133.3713 GBP
> Assets:GB:Freetrade:GIA:Cash 1467.08 GBP
> Income:Investments:PnL -984.48 GBP
>
> I simply removed all mention of USD.
Right, so holding the stocks in GBP instead of in USD. That’s probably what
I’ll end up doing, because I can’t find a better solution – but it is in my
opinion not an elegant solution because the commodity is priced on the market
in USD, not GBP. So holding it in my accounts in GBP means I can’t compare the
price (using Beancount and Fava) to current market prices, as the currencies
are different.
Perhaps I can create a plugin to solve that issue, instead of trying to hold
the stocks in USD.
Anyway, thanks for the input! :-)
--
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 view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/1635BD57-229E-4DAE-91B3-2A6F1C9E4621%40caesarschinas.com.
