Sounds more like he's trying to hand out shares of Apple stock as awards. (I hope they're not back-dating them again) That's the only good reason I can think of to need to track the original prices. However, use of the term "commodity" is completely wrong as that denotes an asset that has no distinguishing characteristics from unit to unit. If it were truly a commodity, the answer would be "charge everyone the average price and it doesn't matter which units they get".