Bug 262380

Version:           SVN trunk
OS:                Linux

Graham Watson would like to request a new feature to support investment grants.
This feature would involve giving the user an option to automatically
subtract a fixed value from the current share price of an investment
when retrieving online stock prices, thus allowing support for use cases
such as when share options are granted to staff as bonuses.

An example use case would be:

Bob's employer feels he is doing well at work. As a bonus they buy for
him 1000 share options at $11.88 per unit. These shares will vest 1 year
later and Bob will be able to sell them, however when he does, he will
only receive cash for the difference between the share price when he
sells them and the original $11.88 unit price. So if they are worth
$12.00 when he sells them, he will receive cash for 1000 * (12.00 -
11.88), or $120.

In KMyMoney, this is difficult to represent because the online price
update doesn't support adding an offset. I have experimented with 2
different ways of achieving it with the current version, however neither
are ideal:

1) First I tried creating a 'dummy' current account and then using the
'Buy Shares' option to buy the shares using the dummy account. This
results in the dummy account showing a large negative number and the
investment account showing a large positive number. Essentially the
dummy account is simulating the total amount that will be subtracted
when the shares are sold, hence resulting in a 'net worth' which is
correct. However since this dummy account doesn't represent any real
physical account it isn't ideal.

2) The second method that I have tried, which I have settled on
currently, is simply to disable the online stock price update, and
periodically perform a manual stock price update where I do the
subtraction myself. This is the method that I would like to essentially
automate with this feature.

It would also be necessary to represent multiple instances of the same
stock type, with different offset amounts. For example, in the use case
above, what if Bob's employer gave him another grant the following
month, but at a different base price of $11.62. It must be possible to
have both stocks available, with a different offset amount for each.

A completely different way of achieving the use case, which you might
find more desirable and cleaner to implement, would be to add an option
alongside 'Add Shares' and 'Buy Shares' called 'Add Share Options',
which works the same as 'Add Shares' but allows the user to type an
offset price per unit at that location. Alternatively an offset price
per unit could just be added to the 'Add Shares' option and have it
default to 0 for normal use.

Reproducible: Didn't try




The original message is dated Fri, 07 Jan 2011 00:30:07 +0000 and has been received on kmymoney2-developer@lists.sourceforge.net