Has anyone found an efficient method of tracking share lots?
Use case. Income tax is paid on realised capital gain/loss when shares are sold.
The Australian tax office allows an investor to choose which lot(s) of shares they are electing to sell when the investor has bought that share on more than one occasion (so owned more than on lot of shares). The default FIFO maximises actual tax payable assuming the investors equities mostly increase in value, so using the ATO supported choice saves significant tax. But doing so requires tracking transactions per share lot.
In Manager transactions for each equity can be displayed via
- System Profit & loss “Investment gains (losses)” account shows unrealised gains/loss but also allows drill down if non zero (typically the case if a non-zero quantity is owned and can be forces by introducing a fractional cent error otherwise). Importantly this screen allows drill down on “Closing balance” for each share which contains the share actual purchase, sales, and capitalised costs, so allows calculation of realised gain/loss. (I have no idea why Manager does not show this information in the Investments tab).
- Create a Control Accounts type Investments for each equity and assign each to the appropriate “Investment” / Share account. After which “Advanced Queries” “where” “Balance sheet account” “contains” the above created control account name. This search also creates a list of transactions for each share so shows net outstanding acquisition cost.
The above enables display of net outstanding acquisition cost. To enable Lot level reporting / monitoring, a lot identifier needs to be added.
- the simplest is prepend a lot code to the line description. While that will work for manual checking and could be made to work with external processing, it will not work with any Manager reports.
- Add a “Lot” custom field. This is not supported at the investment line item level, so would need to be added to all receipts/payments/journal entries, so not really a very clean solution
- I’m can’t see how Inventory Item or Projects could be used.
Has anyone configured Manager to support this functionality?