Beancount models financial transactions. All models are inherently limited <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong>. Some models are more limited than others. Modeling commodities held at cost as price conversions makes it a (very) limited model. If that serves your purposes fully and well, go right ahead. Some questions to help you decide: - Would you want to know the performance of your commodities at a granular level (not just overall net worth) using something like beangrow <https://github.com/beancount/beangrow>? - Would you want to know how much money you made off a particular sale? - Would you want to know which lots to sell to optimize your taxes assuming your tax jurisdiction allows for this? Sounds like it doesn't.
No? Then use price conversions by all means. It's simple to switch down the line. You'll have to redo your sales (reductions), but that's something you'd have done anyway, so it's no extra overall effort. For me, modeling commodities held at cost was one of the huge reasons I switched from ledger (and gnucash before that) to beancount. And v3 will model it even better, by accounting for commissions in the basis. On Wednesday, April 21, 2021 at 8:43:37 PM UTC-7 Max Katsev wrote: > Hello everyone, > > I'm trying to switch from gnucash to beancount and having some trouble > with the concept of tracking investments at cost. I feel that I've RTFM'd > enough to understand the mechanics of cost vs price, but I'm not sure about > the benefits of using cost in the first place. > > Simply put: I have no plans to use beancount to calculate my taxes, why > should I track cost at all? What are the disadvantages of just using price > and not cost for everything (including investments)? As I understand it, > this would be equivalent to how gnucash does it, which seems to work just > fine for me so far. What am I missing? > > In addition to extra bookkeeping complexity, tracking investments at cost > turns capital gains into income, which (while correct from the taxation > point of view) feels wrong to me. When I sell old investments at a gain and > immediately buy something else with the resulting money, it doesn't create > any meaningful income for me (especially if it's in a tax-advantaged > account), my net worth is still exactly the same as yesterday - why do I > want it to show up as income in my reports? > > Thanks, > Max > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beancount+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/d9481f58-7eb2-4335-b18d-74576c95a416n%40googlegroups.com.
