OK, I went to my toy account, and just created a simple traded USD equity account, and I see that with Trading Accounts turned on, they do indeed apply to all Stocks & Currencies. So you get all of these extra trading account entries every time you buy or sell shares in a Stock account. But I also see that the prior Unrealized Gains row in the B/S report is now replaced by Trading Gains. When I sell shares of the stock, it doesn't automatically create any realized gains in my income statement or B/S, so apparently I'd have to add Realized Gains manually to the sall transaction?
I think there is some logic to this, though I'd note there is now no clear/obvious way to distinguish between Trading Gains from currencies vs Trading Gains from stocks (since the offset account for both the stock I created and the non-USD currency are each the USD Trading account.) One takeaway is it seems it's a very bad idea to switch Trading Accounts on *after *one has hundreds or thousands of stock transactions. As it appears I'd have to go and re-enter every single one of them for gc to add the Trading Account splits so that I could recover the Trading Gains (previously unrealized gains on stock investments) to get my Equity accounts in balance. So, for me, I'll have to wait to turn Trading Accounts on until I move all my (private) "Stock" investments to be Asset accounts, and then I'll deal with unrealized markups/markdowns periodically *manually*. So then I can safely turn Trading Accounts on, and they should only apply to my remaining Currency Transactions. I'm still interested in how others with complex/rich multi-currency investment accounts handle all this. And I suppose if you started with Trading Accounts on (or if there is some trick to *ex post *apply the Trading splits to thousands of stock transactions), then Trading Accounts for all investments where you use gc to track prices could make some real sense. (I already made the decision NOT to track individual public equities in gc. I get good reports from my brokerage accounts, and it would be wayyyyyyy too much work to try to match all individual transactions. So I (again) treat brokerage accounts as Asset accounts, and then make debit entries for growth in the account, offsetting with Unrealized Income credits until the end of the year, where I then credit taxable income when I get my tax forms and debit Unrealized income in an offsetting amount. (I am aware that some will choose to credit Equity instead of Unrealized Income, but this works for me in a personal capacity, and at all times I can see how much I have in aggregated unrealized gains that I will eventually have to pay tax on.)) On Wed, Feb 19, 2025 at 6:31 PM David Warren <da...@warren1.net> wrote: > 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.
