On Fri, Aug 11, 2023 at 8:20 PM Eric Altendorf <ericaltend...@gmail.com>
wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 11, 2023 at 3:53 PM Bakul Shah <ba...@iitbombay.org> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Aug 10, 2023, at 4:13 PM, Eric Altendorf <ericaltend...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 3:12 PM Bakul Shah <ba...@iitbombay.org> wrote:
>>
>>> [new user here]
>>>
>>> Consider this example snippet:
>>>
>>> 2023-06-18 * "Buy shares of XYZ"
>>> Assets:US:ETrade:Cash -110.00 USD
>>> Assets:US:ETrade:XYZ 10 XYZ {10.00 USD}
>>> Expenses:Financial:Commissions 10.00 USD
>>>
>>> 2023-07-21 * "Sell shares of XYZ"
>>> Assets:US:ETrade:XYZ -10 XYZ {10.00 USD}
>>> @ 12.00 USD
>>> Assets:US:ETrade:Cash 110.00 USD
>>> Expenses:Financial:Commissions 10.00 USD
>>> Income:US:ETrade:Gains -20.00 USD
>>> //anything else yields an error with bean-check
>>>
>>> As I understand it, actual capital gains in this case would be 0 when
>>> you consider the two commissions.
>>>
>>
>> At least in the US, yes. FWIW, what your ledger currently reflects is
>> that you made 20 USD in capital gains profits but paid 20 USD in
>> commissions, which is a legitimate way of looking at things, just not as
>> convenient for reporting "capital gains" for tax purposes.
>>
>>
>>> But if 20 shares were bought originally with a $10 commission, Cap gains
>>> income would be -5 dollars (since half of the original shares were sold).
>>>
>>> Is there a way to reflect the actual capital gains?
>>>
>>
>> Thanks for your response. Through a connection I asked a couple of
>> experienced CPAs the same question and they suggested this:
>>
>> [image: image.png]
>>
>> Not quite what I was hoping for!
>>
>
> I think this is a pretty standard way of doing capital gains taxes. Add
> the commissions to the cost when you buy, and deduct the commissions from
> the sale when you sell.
>
+1
>
> This is what the linked beancount documentation means when it says: "A
> convenient method to automatically allocate the acquisition costs to the
> pro-rata value of the number of shares sold is to add the acquisition
> trading cost to the total book value of the position [....] You could even
> go one step further and fold the commission on sale into the price of each
> share sold as well"
>
> in this context, "book value" is the same thing as "cost", "cost basis",
> "acquisition cost", etc. (AFAIK)
>
> You can manually adjust your cost and proceeds in this way, and then
> beancount will compute the gain or loss that you expect. Here's what that
> would look like (I think):
>
> 2023-06-18 * "Buy shares of XYZ"
> Assets:US:ETrade:Cash -110.00 USD
> Assets:US:ETrade:XYZ 10 XYZ {11.00 USD}
> ;; Cost per share is 10 USD plus 1 USD of commission
> ;; Expenses:Financial:Commissions 10.00 USD Don't
> account for commissions here
>
> 2023-07-21 * "Sell shares of XYZ"
> Assets:US:ETrade:XYZ -10 XYZ {11.00 USD} @
> 11.00 USD ;; Sale price per share was 12 USD minus 1 USD of commission
> Assets:US:ETrade:Cash 110.00 USD
> ;; Expenses:Financial:Commissions 10.00 USD Don't account
> for commissions here
> Income:US:ETrade:Gains ;; this will now be
> computed as zero.
>
> As you can see, doing things this way isn't as clear to the reader of the
> ledger. What doesn't exist in Beancount is a nice syntax for specifying
> the actual cost and proceeds, and separately specifying transaction fees,
> and asking beancount to do the desired computation, so you get clarity and
> the output you want.
>
In the input syntax you recognize the commissions & fees separately, and
it's at the reporting stage that something's needed to make the necessary
adjustments. I do this in Johnny, and I think it should be easy to write a
script to do this for a Beancount ledger as well.
--
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 view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAK21%2BhOUmjhXcg1HnrFvJxVKQ9bZaC8yf_SHX3UAoN-dMqJM1Q%40mail.gmail.com.
