Yes David there are some "interesting" behaviours within the Lot Viewer,
however with patience and perseverance you should be able to master it,
and one day you will sit back and wonder what all the fuss was about.
I have successfully used Lots for all sorts of corporate actions
including returns of capital, fractional consolidations, demergers,
dividend reinvestments, and partial sales spanning multiple lots. It
can be relied upon to calculate the correct capital gains/losses on each
lot. One of my accounts has over 200 lots in it. The only weakness I
have encountered is that it doesn't include brokerage and other charges,
and there is a workaround for this (nett pricing).
Here are some tips:
Read (and re-read) this excellent guide:
https://codesmythe.gitbooks.io/gnucash-guide/content/en/ch_invest.html.
The team that wrote it deserve a medal!
NEVER EVER click on "Scrub Account" - unless you have a simple series of
Buys & Sells that you are happy to treat on a FIFO basis.
Start with a blank slate. Everything the Lot Viewer does is completely
reversible. Delete all of the "Realized Gain/Loss" transactions it
creates in your register, and then delete all the Lots it created by
selecting them one at a time and hitting the Delete button in the Lot
Viewer.
Manually create a new Lot for each of your "Buy" splits:
(1) Use the "New Lot" button
(2) Select the newly created Lot (in the top panel)
(3) Select the "Buy" split (in the bottom left panel)
(4) Hit the ">>" button.
Manually allocate all of your "Sell" splits to your newly created Lots:
(1) Select the "Buy" Lot (in the top panel)
(2) Select the correct "Sell" split(s) (in the bottom left panel)
(4) Hit the ">>" button - this is the magic step that calculates the
Gain/Loss and creates a corresponding "Realized Gain/Loss" transaction
in the register.
Resist the temptation to click on the "Scrub" button.
Review all the "Realized Gain/Loss" transactions in the register.
Replace the default description with some details of the Sale (eg cut
and paste the description from the Sale transaction).
DELETE the "Orphaned Gains-XXX" account and move its transactions to
your regular Capital Gains / Losses accounts.
Rinse and repeat.
Good luck!
Geoff
=====
On 26/08/2020 12:44 am, David T. via gnucash-user wrote:
Hello,
Having now fiddled with the Lots features some more, I have encountered
some issues with its implementation.
First, if I open up the lots viewer to see what it is doing with lot
allocations, the interface appears to automatically recalculate the gain
in the entire account, and it does this silently when you simply click
on a given lot (e.g., to see its allocation). I discovered this issue
because I was attempting to clean up several accounts in which a stock
split had occurred at some point in the past, and for which I still had
active holdings. Attempting to adjust the transaction for the stock
split to account for an adjusted cost basis caused all gains to become
adjusted--even ones that had been manually entered to match my
institution's accounting.
Second, I am having troubles with the Scrub feature. While manually
assigning a sale to a particular lot, when I clicked Scrub (not Scrub
Account) I found that the viewer would automagically assign subsequent
transactions to the lot--even though I had specifically assigned only
particular transactions to a lot. For example, I have one account where
I had two purchases (i.e., two lots), followed by a partial sale (which
could be assigned wholly to the first lot with remaining shares in that
lot), followed by a reverse split, followed by another sale. For reasons
that were not clear, when I assigned the first sale manually to a
particular lot and then clicked Scrub, the subsequent transaction for
the reverse split kept getting added to the lot. It appears that the
scrub function insists on adding all subsequent share transactions to
the lot. Given that there is no way to process the lot without using the
Scrub in one of its forms, the user is left having to either delete all
subsequent transactions and reconstruct the account step by step, or
abandon the lots altogether for that account. This leaves the user with
the unfortunate situation of having to remember which accounts use lots,
and which don't.
I am not sure how best to proceed for my own accounts; I generally like
the lots features, and hope to find a way to use them even in this
particular use case. I welcome suggestions.
Best,
David
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