I have been using gnucash for almost a year and have a fairly sophisticated set of personal accounts, with lots of investment (asset) accounts.
Basically, I have settled on two types of investment (asset) accounts: 1. Ones where I want to adjust values regularly via adjusting the price of an underlying security, and hence I create these investment asset accounts as Type Stock in gnucash, and then associate each of these Stock accounts with a created security, and 2. Other investment accounts where I manually adjust the valuation, either by debiting/crediting actual cash received into or distributed from the investment account, or I make manual entries for unrealized gains, where I debit the asset account itself (for a gain) and credit an Income:Unrealized Gain:Account Name for the unrealized entry. Later, when I experience realized capital gains for such accounts, I credit the Income:Unrealized Gain account and debit an Income:Realized Gain:Account Name account, which then helps me set up for tax time. I realize that the gnucash documentation suggests creating asset sub-accounts for Cost vs. Unrealized Gain, but (so far), it works for me to use the individual asset account to handle both initial cost and subsequent gains/losses of various types. I have two initial questions about the above set up: 1. When I use Asset accounts of type Stock, and when I update prices in the Price Database, and see the "Current Value" of these asset accounts generally grow, is gnucash creating debit/credit entries somewhere to reflect these changes in value? or no, I can see a "current value" that exceeds cost basis, and I can set certain asset reports to see updated current values, but there actually are no accessible debit/credit shadow entries that I can somehow access / see / visualize / use? 2. In either scenario, when I update valuations (say once every 3 months or so), in addition to seeing new asset values in the asset accounts, I would like to track Deferred Capital Gains Taxes liability account(s), reflecting the amounts I would owe the government in taxes were I to sell investments and monetize capital gains. I am curious how other people with sophisticated investment accounts track deferred capital gains taxes in gnucash. First, do you create an individual Liability:Deferred Taxes Unrealized Gains account (as I have so far), and then use the Description or other fields to indicate which investments resulted in increasing/decreasing this liability account? Do you blow up your account structure by creating Liability:Deferred Taxes:Investment 1, 2, 3, etc. accounts for each and every investment account? When I increase the value of an investment asset account, I generally also credit this Deferred Taxes liability account and debit an Expenses:Taxes:Deferred account. But I've generally manually entered these unrealized gains entries as separate individual entries at quarter end, whereas I think it might make it easier for me to audit/track if when I debit the asset account (for unrealized gains), I go ahead and credit the income:unrealized Gain account, but in that same 'split' entry, also credit the deferred tax liability account and debit the Expenses:Taxes:Deferred account. Do others do these 4-handed entries in this manner? If so, then if no entries are actually created for the asset accounts of type Stock, I would just continue to create manually the Deferred Tax expense debits and liability account credits as I have been doing. I realize I have an inconsistency in that I currently create/track *individual *Income: accounts for Unrealized Gains for each investment account, but on the deferred tax Liability side (as well as for Expenses:Taxes:Deferred tracking) I am lumping the transactions together into single catch-all Tax Liability and Tax Expense accounts. I'm curious how others who have cycled through many tax years handle this. Everything should have a *reason *for tracking. My reason is that if there are gains in certain of my investment accounts, I don't want my net worth to appear higher than it actually is, and I want to be prepared for large tax bills (high class problem) where I will need cash to pay the government when investment gains are ultimately realized. Thanks in advance for any tips or realized practices... David _______________________________________________ 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.
