Withdrawals include only OOP Costs, why?

[SteveP]

I had an issue where the Withdrawals (btw) column in a report was not indicating what I felt was the right value. The definition of Withdrawals (between) on the Custom Report menu is "Value removed between the beginning and ending report dates". When you dig into the manual you find that actually it's not value removed but in the case of transfers out only the OOP cost of the removed shares. My question is why is this the case and what would be a better field to use to give the expected (value removed) behavior?

[Mark]

Hi SteveP,

You can control how the OOP cost is determined for transfers. See "Options / General Preferences... / Other / Transfer Transactions OOP Calculations Use:" and set it to "Market Value".

[SteveP]

Thanks I see that. In the mean time I had solved the problem another way by changing the transfer out to a sale at market price. Could you comment on the difference between these two and in practice what situations should TxOut or In be used? In my case I originally recorded the transaction as a transfer because it was a charitable donation of appreciated stock, so no sale technically occurred.

[Mark]

Hi SteveP,

Generally you would want to use a Transfer Out if you removed shares, and don't want this transaction to show up in the Capital Gains report.

You would use a Transfer In when you need to enter a separate cost basis value/date from the date acquired and the value is different when you transfer the shares as compared to what you paid for them.

Also, transfers are always considered "external" to the portfolio. Regular buys/sells are simpler, and should normally be used unless you have one of these cases mentioned above.