You may wish to read Peter Selinger's essay at https://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/gnucash.html
On Thu, 6 Aug 2020, 7:09 am doncram, <donc...@gmail.com> wrote: > Does GnuCash recognize unrealized gains/losses of investments such as > stocks, so that they would appear in an Income Statement for a given period > and in a Balance Sheet for a given date? And if so, how/where, and can one > control the presentation? > > The online documentation of the Tutorial and Concepts Guide, (at > www.gnucash.org) doesn't say. A lot of effort seems to be devoted to the > good purpose of developing/maintaining the automated updating of prices for > securities, drawing from the internet. The Investments Chapter covers > purchases and sales and other transactions, and in 9.6.5 has an example > "Assets Over Time" bar chart (found by selecting Reports / Assets & > Liabilities / Asset Chart, apparently) showing the changing value of an > investment in Amazon stock, using varying price quotes, so surely an > updated "most recent" value is available for reporting the value of the > Amazon investment in the Balance Sheet report for any given date, either in > total or by basis vs. unrealized gain/loss amounts. Also the amount of > unrealized gain/loss achieved for any period could be computed, using the > price database. Chapter 11 describes manual updating of asset value for a > valuable painting by an explicit entry recognizing unrealized gain, but > this seems not applicable to securities. > > Do the B/S and IS reports reflect these? Sorry for dumb aspect of this > question, because I should be able to figure that out by testing an > example. I am guessing not because it is not described. If the reports > automatically do, then the documentation should report that (and I think it > should be highlighted as a really nice feature of GnuCash not done by, say, > Quickbooks AFAIK). If not, can the amounts be reported, so one could at > least manually record, by journal entry dated December 31, what is > necessary for the B/S and IS to report correctly in total? If it is > automatically done, it seems to me that one would want to designate where > each stock's unrealized gain/loss should go, e.g. into a general > "Unrealized Gain/Loss - Taxable" or a "-Non-Taxable" account. Or for a > more specific account like "Unrealized Gain/Loss in Education Fund" (to > relate this to ongoing thread titled "non-currency liabilities"). > > The not-dumb aspect of this question is to call for a new section in > Chapter 9 and/or Chapter 11 to cover this topic, for an individual and/or > for a business, whether the feature is already developed within GnuCash > 4.0, or not. > --Don > _______________________________________________ > gnucash-user mailing list > gnucash-user@gnucash.org > To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user > If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see > https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. > ----- > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All. > _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
