Hello, James:
On 2020-05-18 12:54, James Cook wrote:
Thanks, Jim, your responses are helpful.
A couple of follow-up questions about doing cost-basis tracking outside
of GnuCash (either for Jim or for the list):
* When you do cost-basis tracking in a separate spreadsheet, do you have
a way to reconcile that with what you have in GnuCash, to make sure
everything's consistent? (I had been hoping to make my life simpler by
having a single source of truth, though as you point out, my scheme
may overcomplicate things.)
No I don't. In fact, my cost-basis spreadsheet predates my use of
GnuCash. And I have done almost no tracking of stocks and lots in
GnuCash, so I don't now how far GnuCash's capabilities can go. From what
I've read of the documentation, I suspect that even if I was using
GnuCash from the start for stock bookkeeping, I would be using a
separate spreadsheet as well.
The financial advice I got was that there is a difference between
securities you own when you enter Canada and securities you buy after
you enter Canada. When you enter Canada, you pick up a second cost base
for each security, equal to the market price — converted into Canadian
dollars — of that security on the day of entry. As you sell those
securities, the Canadian capital gain is based on the Canadian cost
base, while the foreign capital gain is based on the original foreign
cost base at time of purchase. This difference was significant for me
early after my arrival in Canada, with some holdings of my employer's
stock, and with some stock where I had been reinvesting dividends for
decades, all outside of GnuCash. My lot-tracking and
capital-gains-calculating spreadsheet got pretty arcane. Over time, I
sold those shares, and the capital gains tracking became simpler, and my
broker did that work.
I suffer greatly from an belief that, because my finances are composed
of integers (OK, fixed-point numbers) which can have exact sums, they
should be exact. Over time, I have come to realise that life is too
short to track everything exactly. If I can live with what is on my
statements, and if the tax authorities can live with the returns I filed
and the taxes I paid, then none of use needs to be sure that all the
integers were tracked and calculated exactly right.
* I see your point that my scheme is too complicated. But is using
separate cost-basis spreadsheets simpler than, e.g, using a separate
set of GnuCash accounts, or even separate GnuCash files if I want to
keep that stuff really really separate? I guess I'm just wondering
whether spreadsheets are inherently simpler than GnuCash for some
accounting tasks.
A lot depends on what you want to track, and how well you can make
GnuCash accomplish that. See thread /[GNC] Stock "split" exchanging
shares of different currencies?/
<https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2020-May/091160.html>
for a case where GnuCash can't really track a cross-currency stock
transaction which I had in real life.
I don't have anything to add to the rest of your message. You are
thinking methodically about your accounting, and you will be able to
figure out what GnuCash can and cannot do for you. I am confident you
will get it right eventually, and the little learning experiences you
have along the way will be your welcome into the cross-border finances
club. ;-)
Best regards,
—Jim DeLaHunt
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