Stock Accounts

[Bill Gribble]

On Sat, Sep 02, 2000 at 11:17:46AM -0500, Mike Kobler wrote:
> My question is about Stock Accounts.  I have participated in a stock
> purchase plan through my employer for the last few years.  Seeing as I
> just started using GnuCash this year, I figured I would start my accounts
> on 1/1/2000.  How do I go about accounting for stock I purchases in
> previous years??  For my checking, I used the equity account to have a
> non-zero opening balance.  Do I do the same sort of thing for
> Stocks??  

That's a good way to do it.  Make an Equity account with the account's
Currency set to the same value as the Security of your stock account.
That way the units that you transfer in are "shares", not dollars.  

Use the "transfer" dialog to build the transaction, where the amount
is the number of shares you bring in initially.  Then manually edit
the transaction's Price in the stock account register to show the
quoted price at the time you do the transfer in (that won't affect the
balance of any currency-denominated accounts, just the "balance" of
the stock account, which is just an imaginary number anyway).

Bill Gribble