I am running 5.9+(2024-09-28) on Windows 11. I have been using gnucash for 18 months or so, solely for personal finance purposes, but I have a reasonably sophisticated set of investments, including numerous private fund & individual private positions (businesses, real estate, etc.) I set up all these private investments as "Stocks" in new namespaces I created (Private Fund, Private Debt, Private Real Estate), and for better or for worse, treated them like stocks, meaning if I received an initial $15,000 capital call for a private fund, I pretended I purchased 150 shares at $100/share. If the Fund was later marked up to $18,000, I remarked the shares to $120/share. If I then received a distribution, I "sold shares" . (For a number of my investments where there are lots of transactions, I have now moved away from this approach, and converted these investments to "Assets" (not Stocks) and then simply debit the accounts upon in-flows or re-marks, and credit them after distributions to me. I was probably heading to treating ALL my private investments this way, in which case converting them from Stocks to regular Assets would likely make my questions below moot, but I'm still curious how gnucash works so here goes.)
I have NOT been using Trading Accounts, but I have recently stepped up some non-USD investing (also privates), and so set up assets in other currencies, and I was having some issues keeping the books in balance, so today I turned Trading Accounts on. Before adjusting any transactions individually, I checked the balance sheet, and my Assets and Liabilities didn't change, but the move to Trading Accounts immediately removed the balance sheet line item in the Equity section for Unrealized Gains. I then manually re-entered transactions in my non-USD accounts and gnucash asked me if I wanted to enter something manually(*) to remove imbalances from the dual currency splits, or let it add the Trading account entries itself. I let gnucash do the work and the Trading Accounts clearly appear to work as I expected. THe problem is that the Trading Accounts are being applied to my (private) "Stocks" too. Is this expected behavior? I searched pas entries in this list extensively, and there was a bit a of a discussion in 2015 about houses, but it was very hard to figure out. Are my created namespaces what is causing Trading Accounts to apply to my "Stocks"? Or do all Stocks automatically get Trading Account behavior? (That's def not what I would have expected.) I'll do some further experimentation on a toy set of accounts I set up initially to test Trading Accounts on currencies, but the behavior I am seeing is not going to work for me. Separately, does anyone here do "trading accounts" manually for x-currency transactions? If so, why did you choose to do it fully manually without turning on gnucash Trading Accounts? Thanks very much in advance for any thoughts. David (*) Why does gnucash allow for this manual adjustment? What entries would be valid in this instance, as I know you aren't supposed to be able to make entries manually affecting the Trading Accounts. _______________________________________________ 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.
