Andrea The mechanism for recording unrealized gains and losses is basically fairly simple but the devil is as usual in the detail.
You need a sub account of your asset account and a corresponding account in Equity which you could call a revaluation reserve or something similar. This account can be either in Equity itself or could be an Income or Expense account (which is included in profit and loss). Which is appropriate to use depends upon many factors, the asset, the rules that apply to that asset class in your jurisdiction including tax legislation etc., whether the gains or losses are or are not taxable (generally not but as Mike points out not always). These sort of considerations with regard to the reporting requirements will determine exactly where in an account heirarchy this account should be positioned. This is where you need accounting advice relevant to your jurisdiction and your personal situation. When the asset increases in value the asset sub account is debited and the corresponding equity account is credited (and vice versa when a decrease in value occurs). The sub account totals into the asset value. If you are doing this it would also be common practice to have the purchase value of the asset also recorded in a separate sub-account so you can track its value for capital gains purposes in which you would also track events which could affect its cost basis for CGT if appropriate,. The asset's current value being the total of the sub-accounts with the asset account itself a placeholder. This will put the changes in valuation onto the balance sheet. It will also likely affect other reports (e.g. profit and Loss) depending on where the second account is located. To automate this would require a process which takes place automatically whenever the price for the asset recorded in the price database changes which generates the appropriate debits and credits relative to the last price recorded in the database and puts then into a transaction affecting the above accounts. This is not a simple process as this would occur only for certain specific assets or asset classes, and the appropriate account structures associated with the asset and its unrealized gains would need to mapped to each asset class for which this was to apply to. The existing data structures most likely would need some extension to accommodate this (I haven't looked at this aspect particularly). This likely means a lot of checking for unwanted and undesirable effects on the existing functionality during implementation and coding changes affecting a fair bit of the code base. I'm sure there are other issues which this would affect I haven't the depth of knowledge about the code base to appreciate at this point. You could do the above manually whenever you wish to record a change in valuation of the asset at whatever period suits your purpose. David Cousens On Wed, 2022-05-18 at 08:32 +0200, Andrea Borgia wrote: > Any ideas? Was my question perhaps not sufficiently clear? > > Il giorno dom 15 mag 2022 alle ore 17:15 Andrea Borgia <and...@borgia.bo.it> > ha scritto: > > > Hello. > > > > > > Trying to improve my book-keeping, I would like to tackle this issue now > > so I went to the documentation, precisely "11.4.1. Unrealized Gains". > > > > Problem is, the example applies to a painting, that is an object whose > > value changes, not shares whose number remains constant but whose value > > changes, thus leading to a change in total valuation. > > > > > > Since the end goal is to derive unrealized P&L and then include those in > > the economic result for the year, I thought I could record a fake sale, > > after all at book opening the next year I do a fake purchase (with same > > price, just one day apart). If this makes sense, how do I compute the > > P&L given the new price? Must I do that manually with a split or is > > there some kind of assistance by GnuCash? > > > > > > Thanks, > > > > Andrea. > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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.
