Apologies for going a bit tangential - but I thought this would be an interesting point to discuss somewhere
The main reason I record the unit price in commodities held at cost is to match how my brokers store/expose it. Makes it easy to cross-check with statements when needed or for lot matching when selling. A secondary but equally important reason is to catch errors during import. It’s all too easy to miss a new type of fee or such that the importer hasn’t seen, if the total price is “absorbed in”. I would consider implementing this differently. The price exposed on the statement is *not* the price - or, perhaps not always, depending on the broker. It is an *approximation* of the price, sometimes not even significant to the the point that it prints. Vanguard, for instance, on some of my accounts (I think my 529), reports prices at 4 decimal points, but rounds it to 3 with a trailing 0, while I can get the 'more correct' price online. I've also seen different rounding prices in CSV vs OFX exports from the same statements, and I've seen different conventions where trailing 0's are dropped only when correct vs rounding - leading to strict Decimal tolerance issues. But even if all those were solved for, it's not actually the "price.'' When they calculate gains etc, they use whatever they use in the backend - probably to more significant digits than what is exposed. I would suggest a more accurate method to capture that 'approximate' price and do one of two things - either raise an error on import if the 'real' price deviates from the reported price by a significant amount, or store it as metadata you can build checks on later. I only do automatic lot specification so I'm not sure on the best approach to suggest, but I would presume your concerns are also easier to address by specifying date or label of a lot rather than a price, and let the more accurate price calculations run through. The only downside I have encountered with 'accurate pricing' is that Fava displays all the significant digits, and that's annoying - but that would be better solved by a view setting in Fava... -- 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 visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/614ccff7-e41a-4ce6-9442-878bb34a1e89n%40googlegroups.com.
