Tracking Roth IRAs

[zeembloof]

I've been a gnucash user about 15 years.  ...and suddenly I realized I
really am not tracking my Roth IRAs in a useful way.

What I need to track for tax reasons is:
* Amount (in dollars) that has been deposited over the years
* Earnings need to be tracked separately. 
* Conversions from Traditional IRAs

I started down the path of just making sub accounts:
Assets:Investments:MyRoth:Available Funds
Assets:Investments:MyRoth:Earnings
Assets:Investments:MyRoth:Conversions

...but that doesn't really work, as the assets held in this account are
funds.  I'm starting to do Roth conversion laddering and for IRS purposes, I
need to track dollars.  If I deposit $2000 worth of funds in "Available
Funds" in 1998, it will go in as X shares that is worth $2000.  In 2015, it
is likely to be worth $6000.

I've seen folks using a double entry with something like an Expenses
subcategory as a tracking device... but... that's really just not correct
accounting IMO.

My problem is that I actually do A LOT of post processing on the gnucash xml
file on the back end.  I use Expenses/Income/Assets/Liabilities to actually
track/graph real Expenses/Income/Assets/Liabilities.  I'd like it to be
"correct" in an accounting sense and still be able to tag dollar amounts.

The easy answer here is to just track the limited number of transactions in
a separate spreadsheet.  But I'd like to keep it all together and I'd like
to be able to use this data for more graphing (in addition to tracking it
for the IRS.)

The transactions



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