On Sun, Nov 23, 2003 at 03:36:12AM -0500, Greg Stark was heard to remark: > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Linas Vepstas) writes: > > > Code to automatically compute and handle capital gains on stock > > accounts is more-or-less done, in the CVS HEAD branch. There's > > a simple GUI called "View Lots" . > > Uh, so I haven't tried out this new feature, and while it sounds neat I have a > question I fear to ask. This concept of Lots and capital gains being > calculated against the purchase price of specific Lots is the American method > for calculating capital gains. Does Gnucash support other methods? > > For example the Canadian tax calculation (at least as I was taught) is to > calculate the average purchase price of all the holdings of a given stock. So > if I buy 100 shares at $10 and 100 shares at $20, then sell a hundred shares > my cost basis is $15. The remaining shares also have a cost basis of $15.
Right now, there's a plugin architecture that is supposed to deal with this, and I beleive it should be general enough to allow implementing most systems. The two currently supported methods are FIFO and LIFO, and in principle more can be added. (FIFO sells the the earliest shares you bought first, LIFO sells the latest first. Warehouses like LIFO, since it helps hide profits from the tax man). > I wonder if other countries have other creative solutions to this situation. Someone would have to write the code ... although first step would be submit a patch to the src/doc directory that clearly explained how it works. e.g. what if you buy at two different prices days apart? years apart? how about buy, buy, sell some, buy more ... then what's the cost basis? --linas -- pub 1024D/01045933 2001-02-01 Linas Vepstas (Labas!) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP Key fingerprint = 8305 2521 6000 0B5E 8984 3F54 64A9 9A82 0104 5933 _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gnucash.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
