I have been asked by George to post this item which recently exercised my thinking. I have been using Bank Genie for several years particularly when the version with investments was released. It happens that I took out several years ago an investment ISA linked to a fund managed by HSBC. A few years later I took out a further ISA in the same fund. In Bank Genie they were held as separate investment holdings. Of late HSBC has, in its wisdom, combined my holdings and when any transactions subsequently took place it was not possible to determine for which ISA they applied. The answer was to combine the holdings in Bank Genie, but how to do it?
In MS Money (of which I still have a working copy), I found a Combine function, which with a few clicks combined one holding into the other, all historical transactions, leaving a fully detailed single holding reflecting the correct balance as indicated by the fund manager.
In Bank Genie, after consulting George, I elected to perform the combination by inserting two transactions, 1) in the holding to be discontinued, a Shares Out transaction for the balance of the holding and then 2) a Shares In transaction to the other holding for the same amount. On completion the balance of the second holding reflected the correct balance as indicated by the fund manager.
There is one problem. The shares out transaction was entered at a zero price. The Shares in transaction was entered with the price of the day. The result is that in order to calculate a correct gain or loss figure, the values of gain or loss in each holding have to be added together to achieve the true figure. (I am not sure if this was the correct action.) The "from" holding thus must be retained for that purpose and as a record of historical transactions which remained behind.
I suspect this is not a frequent event, but perhaps prevalent enough to suggest an addition to Bank Genie of the "Combine Holdings" function the MS Money has. In the absence of that, the method described appears to have achieved the main objective in that future transactions need not be concerned with the original holding. That is a testament to Bank Genie!
