Active traders occasionally will buy and sell a security on the same date.  Even if you are an inactive trader, you may find yourself selling mutual fund shares on the same date that dividends or capital gains are being reinvested.

 

Purchases Before Sales - The cost basis of same-date purchase (BUY, BYD, BYC, DRI, IRI, etc.) and sell (SLL, SLW, SLS, etc.) transactions in the same security are calculated in the order that the transactions occur in the portfolio file.  Thus, to obtain correct cost bases, a sales transaction must be preceded by the purchase of sufficient shares to facilitate the sales transaction.

 

Sales Before Purchases - However, if in fact a sales transaction occurs earlier in the day than the purchase of covering shares, then the sales transaction was in fact a "short sale" and a SLS transaction, followed by a BYC transaction should be used to record this fact.

 

Income Transactions Before Sales - Dividends, interest, or other income transactions which occur on the same day as the sale of the stock, bond or mutual fund generating that income should be placed before the sell transaction in the transaction listings. Income payments received after liquidation of the security position generating those payments, should in general be dated the date of the liquidation, if they were in fact owing on that date.

 

Splits Before Sales - Split shares should be recorded prior to sales transactions which involve post-split shares. This should be the case even if the split shares are received several days after the sale and are returned to the broker.

 

Re-ordering Same-Date Trade Transactions - If same-date trades are imported out of order, e.g. with "SLL" transactions appearing before the "BUY" transactions for the same date, you can re-order the transactions by filtering on the "SLL" transactions, then

highlighting the "Date" field for these transactions and clicking on the "Compute" icon (or "Data/Compute Fields" command).  Then remove the filter.  You should see that the "SLL"'s always follow the "BUY"s for a given date.  Repeat this using "BYC" in lieu of "SLL" if you have short sale transactions out of order.