Absolutely, you can do anything. But to correctly track the cost basis of stock when you have multiple purchases and sales you have to keep track of what you paid for each share, when you bought it, when you sold it, and how much were the fees and commission costs. Then, when selling fractional lots, you have to also track the remaining shares. in many jurisdictions it matters how long you held the shares and whether you use the the FIFO method, LIFO method, average cost or pick and choose method when there is a mixture of lots to evaluate.
As you know, Gnucash is not inventory oriented, and it also requires you to be consistent with either tracking commissions and fees separately or burying them in your cost basis. In the US, the government does not like to trust individuals to make those calculations correctly, so they require stock brokers to make those calculations and report them directly. Thus you also have the burden of trying to match whatever they report. I am deliberately avoiding describing the details required to meet these challenges, because there are many ways to do it, depending on your preferences. David Carlson On Fri, Mar 27, 2020 at 4:13 PM Michael or Penny Novack < stepbystepf...@comcast.net> wrote: > On 3/27/2020 2:33 PM, David Carlson wrote: > > Ken, > > > > One issue that may be of concern to you is the way Gnucash tracks capital > > gains. It cannot follow tax law definitions exactly by default as that > > requires tracking expenses such as fees in a very complex way to apply > > partial fees to the cost basis when partial closing transactions occur. > > > > Many users track cost basis separately, especially if they have "lots" of > > transactions [pun intended]. See discussions about lot tracking for more > > details. > > > > David Carlson > > > I do not understand. Are you saying that transactions entered using old > fashioned pen and ink on paper bookkeeping could not follow tax law > definitions? > > Because ANYTHING you could do pen and ink on paper you could do using > gnucash. > > Michael D Novack > > _______________________________________________ > gnucash-user mailing list > gnucash-user@gnucash.org > To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user > If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see > https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. > ----- > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All. > -- David Carlson _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
