On 23/05/16 13:33, Mitch Frazier wrote:
Either I wasn't clear or you're misunderstanding what I'm saying,
<snip>
the
"cost basis field" is the amount that is used to reduce the remaining
basis of the asset. If you sell the entire investment, the reduction
would be the entire cost of the investment (thereby reducing the cost to
zero). The reason that you might need to adjust the cost basis is for
exactly the reason that you pointed out: when you sell less than the
full asset, there's more than one way to determine the cost of the part
that was sold. You can use "average cost", "FIFO", or "specific lots"
(and probably some others) to determine the cost of the part that was
sold. A more sophisticated user interface for entering/determining the
cost would be a refinement, this is just meant to be a first step along
the way. The difference between the sales price and the cost basis of
the part that was sold is the gain/loss on the sale.
Creating a "category" for storing the cost and/or recovering the cost
doesn't make any sense, the cost is already stored in the investment
account (the stock/bond account). It contains the original amount
(amounts if more than one purchase was done). The difference between
the sales price and the "cost basis" of the sale is the gain/loss on the
transaction and that would go to one or more "categories".
As far as developers with the time to implement it, when I said "I was
thinking about implementing" I meant I was going to work on the
implementation.
I made no comment about the proposed functionality.
Neither did I suggest that the developers might have to implement it.
However, they do have a say it what gets implemented, and it was that to
which I was referring.
Allan
On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 3:14 AM, aga <agande...@gmail.com
<mailto:agande...@gmail.com>> wrote:
On 22/05/16 20:04, Mitch Frazier wrote:
While entering a number of investment transactions recently I
realized
that KMM doesn't actually have a way to record the gain/loss on
the sale
of an investment. I was thinking about implementing something to
solve
this but wanted to pass the idea past the list first.
As a first step at a solution, I was going to add a couple more
rows to
the transaction detail in the investment register:
- A cost basis field. This would be an amount field that is
used to determine how much the cost of the investment is
reduced by the sale. Initially this field could be pre-filled
by the average cost (based on the number of shares being
sold).
If the entire investment is sold, this field would be fixed
and not editable.
- A gain/loss field. This would be an splitable account field
for entering the category or categories for the gain/loss.
Splits are useful for allowing both short-term and long-term
gain/loss specifications on a transaction.
The current implementation "hides" the gain/loss because the
balance of
an investment shows as zero when the share value is zero,
regardless of
the amount the investment is sold for. Whereas, since the
gain/loss is
not recorded anywhere, the balance ought to be negative if the
investment was sold for a gain and positive if sold for a loss.
Mitch
I think the developers will need to comment on this proposal. From
my own point of view, it is not a functionality that I need, at
least at present. What's more important, though, is that it might
be advisable for display of the extra fields to be optional,
certainly from the perspective of a new user.
Allan
