Add Investment Account Transaction Merge and Share Transfer Functions/Transaction Types
This year (again) I have found these two investment account functions/transaction types would sure be nice to have. To be clear, the Share Transfer should be direct without any buy or sell involved.
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1 Posted by Stuart Beesley ... on 15 Mar, 2022 04:29 PM
Toolbox can merge two investment accounts together - the whole account and all transactions. Any good?
2 Posted by avp2 on 15 Mar, 2022 04:50 PM
If it only does a whole account, probably not. I have had a number of stock exchanges (no buy or sell) between accounts - this year a bunch - where such a function would be nice in the drop down type list.
3 Posted by rocket on 18 Mar, 2022 03:45 PM
I absolutely agree on the share transfer function (no buy sell). I think this is absolutely essential for modern crypto exchanges and transaction types where you are often transferring crypto securties to different wallet/exchanges. For now I have to "shadow" my transfers by keeping them in the investment account I made the original purchase of the crypto security in. And that ends up becoming a painful mess reconciling balances and tracking interest/yields from each exchange/wallet. I had posted on a separate thread as well some of the use cases:
- transfer crypto security to yield platforms (no buy or sell occurs, it is simply transferred to a new platform wallet)
- transfer crypto to cold storage or personal wallet
I think this is a value add feature for investment accounts that more customers are going to recognize as missing when they attempt to incorporate crypto securities in their investment portfolio (and I don't see that adoption slowing down any time soon)
4 Posted by Stuart Beesley ... on 18 Mar, 2022 03:50 PM
I’m thinking of writing such a function. So, out of interest, how would it actually work? It’s more complex than you might imagine.
5 Posted by rocket on 18 Mar, 2022 04:12 PM
Are you asking how it would work at a code/data model level or at a User Experience level? I actually was thinking about digging into the Extensions and python scripting but I couldn't find any meaningful documentation on the data models or what functionality is exposed for python scripting. I imagine that exists somewhere.
So without a full understanding of that it's difficult to provide a lot of detail on the implementation side. I'm going to spend a few cycles thinking about it as I can imagine some of the implications of how is a security recognized from cost basis history in the purchased account vs if it were to be sold in a destination account, also what about the bank register and accounting for the transfer etc. My intuition is that there would be some hybrid notion of a buy sell that migrated some of the security history in the source investment account into the destination account. Or the destination account linked back to source account in a shadowed way while modifying the UI to make it seem as if it was transferred.
6 Posted by Stuart Beesley ... on 18 Mar, 2022 04:58 PM
@rocket - no not a coding level, but just the English language level.
For example... Within an Investment account a security is traded. There are buys and sells. The running total is the share balance. The cost basis is dynamically calculated at the same time based on buy / sell rules. When using lot matching, you also match lots etc.
So for a txfr to work, what are you actually wanting to happen?
- A new transaction that effectively does a sell and buy between accounts (along with transferring the cash balance) at the cost basis..... OR
- Magically transfer the original buy/sell txns over to the new account.. This would work, but what about the cash used in the first place? So do we do a xfr for the cash needed? What about LOT matching if a date range was used too.... What about associated dividends needed for performance reports?
etc
7 Posted by Stuart Beesley ... on 18 Mar, 2022 04:59 PM
What's stopped me from coding this over the last two years, is working out what actually to do........ (The coding as such is easy)....
8 Posted by dwg on 18 Mar, 2022 09:46 PM
It is easy to do in a program that is not based on accounting principles - think of a well known program that is capable of creating or losing money in thin air and we have to deal with the problems of regularly.
The problem becomes how can it be done yet still satisfy accounting rules so that Moneydance is happy and that is the tough one.
In Moneydance investments are recorded at book value i.e. cost price, but when you look at things like net worth it calculate a current market value by using the latest price. So there are two sides, the transaction recording side and the reporting side and I think this may be the key to handling such a transaction.
We know we can manually "move" by doing a sell at cost price a cash transfer then a buy at cost price and recording wise this works but it stuffs up reporting (when the reports work correctly but that is another story).
Part of the reporting problem could be resolve if the tax date field was used in reporting. This field would be used as the effective date thus the normal date remains the date the event happened, but the effective date is the reporting date. There is still the problem though if reports remain account centric rather than investment centric, your capital gains would be correct under the method outlined but you total ROI (I could argue here that reports are needed that look at capital gains and investment income separately too) would likely be wrong if reports are account centric.
Yes lots would have to be allowed for as well since lot matching is mandatory in some countries. It is only in very rare circumstances I can dispose of shares and not use matching (the circumstance normally are in some company acquisitions).
Investments in Moneydance could do with a fair amount of work - having things like splits and lots is a start but there are still a few really important actions it does not have
My 2 cents worth.
9 Posted by Stuart Beesley ... on 27 Mar, 2022 01:34 PM
FYI. I have a preview version of Toolbox that has enhanced ‘move investment transactions’ capabilities with filters. It also allows you to select in the register and move from there too. Let me know if interested to have a ‘play’?
10 Posted by dtd on 27 Mar, 2022 08:33 PM
just a user - and "have a play" means to start on a test database first versus your live data. Stuart is magnificent in his coding and created functions, but "move investment transactions" can have implications that can't be restored if wrong, so AT MINIMUM make a backup before you begin in case you need to restore.
11 Posted by Stuart Beesley ... on 28 Mar, 2022 12:05 PM
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System closed this discussion on 27 Jun, 2022 12:10 PM.