pad equivalent for investments, USD as an account, and in-kind distributions

[jrgo...@gmail.com]

Hi everyone,

I've now successfully gotten two banks working with smart importer. Since bank accounts only have a balance and then link to expenses it's straightforward to using the "pad" operation and start at some point in time and then later go back, if you want, and import more data.

I'm now focused on investments. I have used reds_importers so far and have one working for Vanguard and it works great. However, I have two questions:

1) The bean-extract operation generates per-commodity accounts. Are you supposed to have one for USD? (e.g.  Assets:US:Investments:Taxable:Brokerage:Vanguard:USD)

2) I started by trying to import since July 2018. I have some sales where beancount doesn't know the cost basis. I think I may either have to manually add the purchase or keep importing like 5 years of data to then get it error free. Is there an interim solution recommended before I get all that data gathered?

3) How does one handle "in-kind distributions"? Basically, I invested cash into a fund which later bought some stocks and instead of returning cash it gave back stock on a specific day with a specified value. You need this to compute the fund performance but there is not necessarily a transaction on that day of transfer. This is common situation to let the investor decide if they want to sell. They also provide the purchase price information of the stock. How does one report all this for beancount?

thanks,

Jonathan