Jim, I'll address a little of this from my non-technical, non-accountant perspective.
I don't know the rationale behind those intermediate accounts, and I don't use them. That said, each investment type behaves a little differently, and perhaps separating them makes some operations easier to manage. But I don't know. As for the main brokerage account question, I will say that I mostly have followed the template format and put cash transactions into it, without noticeable problem. There is a camp of Gnucash users who feel strongly that one should only put transactions into leaf (lowest layer) accounts, and one of them will explain their reasoning, I'm sure. I've experimented with using a subaccount for these transactions, but I don't like trying to find that cash account later on, since it ends up embedded in the alphabetical sequence of accounts. I could kludge the name for the cash account to bring it to the top, but that just annoys my aesthetic. (For the record, I use account codes for most accounts, but not for commodities, and let commodity accounts sort by name. Assigning codes for commodities accounts is cumbersome, given a large set of commodities/accounts. Ideally, I'd assign a code just to the cash account and get it at the top, but the sorting puts nothing before something, leaving the cash account at the bottom. I don't know if I can sort by account type, but even if I did, I don't know how I'd sort the chart by code and then type...) Best, David On August 14, 2022 4:40:17 AM GMT+03:00, Jim DeLaHunt <list+gnuc...@jdlh.com> wrote: >Hello, folks: > >I have been using GnuCash for a long time, starting with the GnuCash template >account tree and modifying it gradually, but never thinking hard about it. >Until now. I am adding a bunch of investment accounts. This makes me look more >closely at the template account structure depicted in ><https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v4/C/gnucash-guide/invest-setup1.html>. > >This structure is: > > * Assets > o Investments > + Brokerage account > # Bond > # Mutual Fund > # Stock > * AMZN > >What is the reason for the template inserting the layer of subaccounts between >"Brokerage account" and "AMZN" (for Amazon.com stock)? Why shouldn't the child >accounts denominated in each security be directly under the "Brokerage >account" account (as long as the parent account is denominated in the currency >which the securities are priced in)? > >For my own purposes, it seems simpler to me to have the per-security child >accounts be directly under the "Brokerage account". Is there a rationale for >the intermediate accounts which I am missing? > >Also, in the template, the "Brokerage account" is of type "Bank", and is not a >placeholder. That seems to imply that cash and cash-equivalent transactions >should be applied directly to "Brokerage account". Somehow I ended up making a >child account "Cash CAD" (or "Cash USD", or whichever), and applying all the >cash-equivalent transactiosn there. My equivalent of "Brokerage account" has >no transactions, and is often a placeholder account, and has account type >"Asset" rather than "Bank". Is there a reason to put the cash transactions >directly in the brokerage account, or is this a matter of personal preference? >(In which case, I will keep the structure I have.) > >Thank you in advance for your insight, > —Jim DeLaHunt > >_______________________________________________ >gnucash-user mailing list >gnucash-user@gnucash.org >To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: >https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user >----- >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 ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
