How to deal with "buy amount" being more/less than stock's number of shares * price in GnuCash?

Question

My investment firm (Fidelity) allows the buying of fractional shares. I purchased some shares of stock with the following details:

Purchase-1: shares: 0.008 | price per share: $124.42 | total amount I paid to get the 0.008 shares = $1.04

Purchase-2: shares: 10 shares | price per share: $111.25 | total amount I paid to get the 10 shares = $1,112.45

As you can compute by doing the math, the total amount paid does NOT equal shares*price. Purchase-1 should have only costed $1 and Purchase-2 should have costed $1,112.50.

How do I account for this in Gnucash because it will not let me input the actual money I spent on the shares.

(I phoned Fidelity and they explained this discrepancy is normal, a result of fractional share buys).

Answer 1

Leaving aside brokerage fees and other costs, the relationship between the number of shares purchased and total cost should comply with a simple formula:

[Number of shares] x [price per share] = [Total cost]

You are having difficulty recording your share purchases in GnuCash using the details provided by Fidelity because the information provided by Fidelity was incorrect. This is a Fidelity problem, not a GnuCash problem. For each share purchase, Fidelity has provided you with three pieces of data, at least one of which is provably wrong.

If you know how many shares you possess after your purchase, and you know the total cost, then my preference would be to adjust the share price accordingly. If you prefer to adjust the number of shares, or the total cost, then go right ahead and do that instead.

If you try to record sensible data about your share purchases, GnuCash will let you do that.