Stocks and Balancing Accounts
Daniel Carrera
daniel.carrera at zmsl.com
Sun Jun 15 07:05:10 EDT 2008
Hello,
I want to buy stocks, but I fear that GnuCash won't handle stock prices
properly. Suppose I own stock XYZ valued at $1050 but GnuCash only has a
record of me putting in $1000. The other $50 are stock appreciation. In
this scenario, the accounts won't balance.
In the ideal world, GnuCash should realize that changes in stock prices
are capital gains or loses, that that's a type of income, and that the
accounts do balance. But GnuCash won't do that.
How do you deal with this problem?
I encountered a similar problem earlier with currencies. The way I dealt
with that was to create a bunch of "Currency" accounts. So, for
instance, if I wanted to exchange $1500 USD for 1000 EUR I would do this:
1. Transfer 1500 USD from "Banks > My US Bank" to "Currency > USD".
2. Transfer 1000 EUR from "Currency > EUR" to "Banks > My EU Bank".
I don't love this method, but it works well enough.
But what do I do with stocks? Do I have to make a separate "Currency"
account for each and every stock I want to buy? Is that the solution?
Thanks
Daniel
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