I realise that there have been no improvements to the Investments module and that there may be no interest in doing so. However, I have been struggling to resolve an error in the balance sheet which can occur when investments are sold.
In addition to recording the sale, as described in the Guides, it is essential to also record the market value at that sale date as well. If you don’t, the market value of investments with zero shares will continue to appear on the balance sheet. An easy way to check this is to look at the Investments tab to see if investments with a quantity of 0 (zero) still show a market value. If so, find the sale price and date, and set the Investment Market Price (Settings) to the sale price on the date sold.
It would be nice if this happened automatically, but it doesn’t. An update to the guides might help people avoid my mistake, which took a long time to track down.
Correct
When selling an investment, on the sales invoice/ receipt
Create a line for each investment lot being sold showing the purchase price and how many of that lot being sold on this occasion. Allocate it to the balance sheet investment at cost account.
After listing all lots being sold, allocate the remainder to the Profit and loss “Investment realised gain/loss” account
keep track of how much of each lot has been sold in an external spreadsheet.
Tracking investment at cost is currently best done in Manager by ensuring no market valuation prices are entered because Manager currently can not be set up to separate realised and unrealised gain/loss. Entering Market revaluations in Manager can then be done via a journal entry between appropriate Balance sheet and Profit/loss unrealised gain accounts
Faced the same issue before. Even after selling all shares, the market value stayed on the balance sheet. Updating the market price to the sale value on that date fixed it.
Definitely worth mentioning in the guide — took me a while to figure out.